Chapter 39: Cormac
“Do ya trust her?” Joey asked Cormac as they watched the thick night lift to gray, the washed out moments right before dawn erupted and stole the show with its garish sun.
Cormac didn’t answer right away. He hoped maybe the question would unravel itself, that Joey would rescind the words and admonish himself for asking something so thoughtless. Instead, the inquiry hung heavy between them, a plume of fog in the halcyon, premature aurora.
“‘Course I trust her,” Cormac said when he realized Joey meant to wait for an answer no matter what. “If she had wanted to fuck us over, she would have done it already.”
“I mean more than just that kinda trust. Do ya trust her to stick around? To really be a mate to you? She hasn’t seen you hunt and kill. She hasn’t seen what it’s like to be one of us. What if she can’t handle it?”
Cormac got into the cab of his truck without acknowledging anything Joey just said. “Let’s go.”
“That’s your answer, huh?”
“Joey, get in the truck.”
The ride up to the cave was silent. Both their windows were down, and even the natural world seemed eerily quiet. Cormac tried not to pay attention to it; it felt too much like an omen. He had hoped that his belief in omens and signs and the ridiculous superstition inherent in the shifter culture had faded at least enough to not cause him anxiety. As they crested towards the cave at the top of the hill, the sun brandishing its power behind them, Cormac realized he believed in all these things right then and there more than he ever had in his life.
A truck was already sitting there when they drove up. They parked on the opposite side of it, squinting towards the tinted windows to see who they were facing.
“Think that’s this Wes guy?” Joey asked. Cormac just shrugged. He couldn’t waste energy on speaking at this point. Right now, he was laser focused on what was ahead.
The door to the other truck swung open, and a tall man with salt and pepper hair got out. To Cormac, he seemed too old to be someone Maxine would have known well. When Cormac made eye contact with him, the man smiled placidly, and Cormac was struck by what he saw. The resemblance was unmistakable. If he did know better, Cormac would have thought the man was Maxine's father.
“You see it, don’t you?” the man said, not moving from his stance, not dropping his placid grin. “People always said she and I looked a lot alike.”
Cormac didn’t acknowledge what the man asked the same way he had ignored Joey’s comment earlier. Like Joey, Wes wouldn’t let the question disappear. He held his frozen smile, his eyes glittering in the crowning light of morning.
“You do,” Cormac answered after a long beat. “You look a lot like her.”
“Like maybe she could have been my daughter, right?” The gleam in Wes’s eyes faded. “What did they tell you I was to her? Her cousin? Older brother maybe?” When Cormac didn’t speak up, Wes laughed again. It was the sound of ice shattering, cold blue fire licking the empty space between them.
Cormac’s tongue knotted itself. He stumbled to speak through it. “I-I-I was...Maxine always told me her father was dead.”
“That’s what her freak of nature mother told her, I’m sure.” Wes shrugged as if he was completely cavalier about the whole topic; as if this was all just a friendly discussion. “Turns out that your kind is as benevolent as you like to pretend they are. Maxine’s mother kept me away from her for her entire life because I wasn’t one of you.” He jabbed a finger hard into his own chest. “Because I was human.”
“You’re not allowed to be angry, Wes,” Cormac said with an authority he was unsure he actually had. “Humans slaughter us when they get the chance. She was trying to protect her daughter.”
“More than I can say for you!”
The outburst came so pointedly that it struck Cormac like a slap. Up till then, Wes had been so composed, so utterly in control. Cormac witnessed the melting of the ice in his eyes, the promise of burning rage being brought to the surface.
Wes’s mouth folded into a slash across his face. His decorum returned; the blood left his cheeks except for bonfires of bright red sitting high, just below his eyes. “I was told that you were supposed to kill the man who shot Maxine.”
“Only according to shifter law.”
“And you consider another law higher than that?” Cormac nodded. Wes sneered without hearing his answer. “I should have guessed you were one of those.”
Wes opened the door of the truck and reached inside. He lifted a gun off the seat and aimed it at Cormac. Cormac heard Joey jump to action but he turned and signaled for him to stay put. If Wes planned on shooting him, Joey wasn’t going to stop him by getting himself killed first.
Cormac let his palms turn upwards, fingers spread wide. “What a human way to kill someone, Wes.”
“How could you waste your existence the way you do?” Wes asked, coming closer, the gun lazily pointing at Cormac. “Your kind could thrive; you could live totally and completely by your own rules. You wouldn’t have to live in fear from small minded bumpkins.” He swallowed; Cormac noticed the halo of tears concentrating along the bottom lid of Wes’s eyes. “A terrified little man with more guts than brains would have never gotten anywhere near my Maxine if you people didn’t insist on living this way.”
“Wes, this is much more complicated than that,” Cormac told him but Wes aimed the gun skyward and fired two quick shots. Cormac tightened up as not to flinch from the noise.
“Let’s get this show on the road, gentlemen,” Wes said.
It was then that Cormac noticed the moving forms and shapes that had been hunched against the rise of rocks, tucks into the crevices, immersed in the dank dark of the cave. Shifters, recruited to this ugly task; brought into an arrangement they believed was their last chance. In his periphery, Cormac saw two of them start to change.
“You really think you can keep this pack safe?” Cormac asked as the others started to shift and Wes got closer and closer with the gun. “You really think you can release a story like this and not run the risk of these people getting killed?”
Wes grabbed him by the front of the shirt and yanked him forward. He brought Cormac as close to him as he possibly could, and in his tight, airy voice, he whispered, “they’re not people.”
When Wes let go of Cormac, he was smiling again. None of the shifters had been close enough to hear. They were all going to willingly rip Cormac apart on the word of a man who considered them expendable. Whatever they were being promised was their price; whatever he offered had swayed them easily.
Cormac pointed to Joey behind him. “He’s got nothing to do with this, Wes. I only ask you let him go.”
“Cormac,” Joey started but he shut up real fast when Cormac glared at him.
“Whatever you gotta do to me, that’s fine,” Cormac said, “but he didn’t do nothin’ wrong. Maxine loved him a lot.”
“Your entire pack will be dead soon anyway so I don’t see the point but sure.” Wes gestured at Joey with the gun. “Whoever you are, you can leave. Run and get help or whatever you think you’ll be able to do.”
Cormac still had his hands raised when Joey climbed into the cab of his truck, their sights rarely breaking connection. He had never seen Joey look so frightened; part of him wondered if Joey had ever seen him like this. As the truck ground over the rough road, Wes brandished the gun towards Cormac until he fell to his knees on the dusty plateau. Cormac prayed to anything above them, god or devil or the empty, heartless universe from where life inexplicably sprung, that the last time his cousin saw him would not be collapsing forward, his hands in the air, a loaded phallus of metal directed right into his face.