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Jeremiah…

Jeremiah’s heart sank. What were the chances? It couldn’t be blue, the material that they used in their darts to force change. There were so few places in the world that made it. The Sheep having blue was beyond imagining. Had some desperate Shifter sent a vial to a human buyer?

The product must be something a huckster made up, chasing along the lines of myth and lies that always floated underneath the truth. The material they had was probably tinted body lotion. A new flow of staff worked their way through the crowd, this time with a sweet, tinted a violet shade of blue. Was this part of the theater? People around him laughed and popped them into their mouths. The terrifying, smiling blond pushed out her lower lip into a pout and spread her arms. “How disappointing. I didn’t change.” The man with her laughed.

Jeremiah passed on the sweet and when another was offered to him more aggressively, he bent down and whispered, “I’m diabetic. I can’t.” The lies slipped past his lips, the same way they did when the police officers tried to get them to expose the latest location for their stills. A lie told, when the listener had bad intent, was no sin. He didn’t lie to fool or trick others, but to protect.

On the far side of the room, a woman screamed. “Barry, what is wrong?”

Her partner fell to the ground, twitching violently. Had they poisoned some of their offerings? Jeremiah was grateful that he had cracked his glass instead of draining it. As others backed away, forming a space around the couple as the man on the screen taunted the girl in the cage.

The screams the man on the floor made were unearthly. They wobbled, falling and rising. The man bit into his own tongue as he flailed and blood erupted from his mouth. Red spread at his wrists, his ankles.

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One of the lost? Perhaps generations lost. As Jeremiah stepped closer, he realized that this creature’s bloodline was not human, but other. A first change, in later years, forced upon someone was a death sentence. He shuddered, watching the man have a seizure on the floor. Blood ran from his body as the blue forced his seams open. Each beat of his heart poured more of his life onto the polished floor.

Camera’s in the room swiveled in the direction of the dying man’s contorting body. Jeremiah eased himself backward in the crowd, a row deep, two. People screamed as the man came apart. There would be no turning. This body did not know how. He was unwinding. So much blood.

“Help him.” His wife screamed, shrill and desperate. She tried to pull him closer to her, to stanch the blood with her bejeweled hands. Glittering gown ruined, she held a dead man in her lap as a pool of sticky red blood spread out around her, bright and verdant as a poppy.

Is this what they wanted? To kill for no reason at all? Jeremiah shuddered as he considered what would have happened if he had carelessly taken the offered sweet canape. He’d be writhing on the floor too, but not dying. One careless action on his part could have accomplished what they were trying to do with the child. His blood chilled and he was grateful that they hadn’t filled the space with Bears. What if someone had been incautious?

*

Kennedy…

Silently, she sat between Red and Terry. There was a grimness to the way Red held his jaw. When they had shown up at his work, he’d taken one look at Terry and removed his work gloves. They had shovels, lime, and each other. She’d given up trying to get information from the Wolves about Jeremiah and David. They were silent and unresponsive.

Wordlessly she prayed, not to the bright round face of the moon but to her sisters, the stars, who numbered in the millions, sparkling in the clear sky. She knew the back way up to the mountain well enough now. Her phone would soon be a rock, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t like they could leap to Colorado and change whatever mad plan the Wolves had come up with. David and Jeremiah were entangled in their big plans. On the mountain, the three of them had much more private and sacred work to do.