Dad gets out his phone as if to start on that right away, and you feel a little panicky, because you really need the morphine now but you have to figure things out first and they are not helping. "Well, somebody is keeping all this secret!" you insist desperately. "Dad! Erskin, I'm healing way too fast at a public hospital! And there'll be news guys, and someone is going to see us on the internet and go 'hey that 'dog' is an endangered species' --" "The veterinarian already did," Dad says, much too calmly. "!" you say, your stab wound screaming at the tightening of your ribs. "I had a talk with him."
You go and sit on the edge of the bed as well as you can, feeling even more ungainly than is usual, and huddle over Bel's front, your elbows against his shoulders. "Hey, hey, it's alright," you tell him, kissing his hair. "No one's going anywhere they don't want to go. Your dad and I are pretty scrappy, you know, we can keep you safe. We'll find somewhere you're safe." You glance back over your shoulder. "Can we den up at your place?" you ask Alex. "Surely it would be easier to fend off anyone who wants to take a bite out of our Bel if we could stuff him into that bedroom of his and sit on the stairs."
Dad beams at the phrase 'our Bel' and you go melty. "Perfect," Dad says. "I think I was edging up on that idea myself. That's not leaving the state, so we're fine legally; that poor Park Service policewoman will have to road trip if she wants to talk to you in person again, but the FBI fellows are based in St. Paul anyway. I'll get you a nurse who doubles as a guard. Maybe... do you remember Corporal Daily from the rescue unit?" "Becca," you remember. Round tan face, tightly braided hair, alert brown eyes. Calm about the blood. You're about to say okay, but then you remember why Daily looks so trustworthy; she reminds you of -- "No. Sergeant Dakota Pancho. We were friends on base, on my deployment, she was there when I came in and she was always checking up on me. Think her tour's almost up, too." "You trust her?" "Yeah. You might have to do your politics thing to get her. She's not just some E-3 nurse, she's a surgeon with front line combat experience." "Good." "Plus she'll be able to handle the werewolf thing, I think. I never saw anything phase her except a pretty girl."
You're a little uneasy about the idea of bringing in more people— even one more person— but it's Bel's life, and with any luck he's got decent taste in friends. "Whatever you think is best," you say. "Except working yourself into a panic about CIA goons. That's not anywhere near best."
You can see he's worried about the idea of a stranger finding out about the werewolves. "She doesn't have to know about you, if you don't want. You can decide after you meet her. But she needs to know about me to take care of me, medically speaking. Hell, she might already know; it was the Army that was so calm about discharging me, and she did visit me in the medical tent after I was bitten, before they shipped me home, though she wasn't my doctor there." You cup his face, stroke his soft stubble. "You're the antidote to my panicky feels. Keep telling me it'll be okay." Dad clears his throat. "I'm going to give you boys a little privacy. The guards will stay at the end of the hall until the next nurse shift change. I'll uh... try to contact Reginald Aspera."
You mumble something grateful but indistinct, then return to nuzzling the absolute shit out of Bel, until he consents to take his damn morphine and goes all soft and fuzzy. You stay with him in human shape for awhile, combing out his hair with your fingers, then shift back once he's asleep and stretch out on the cot, too, to tuck your nose against his throat and doze off as well.
You're vaguely aware, off and on, of Dad being on the phone a lot, of the nice vet coming in to see Erskin once more, of the nurse flirting with the guard and Erskin having hot dog breath. But the next time you're actually in the loop is when you're helped gently into a wheelchair, and Dad clips a brand new leash onto Erskin, and you all go to the civilian airport. "No chopper?" you say disappointedly. For some reason you love riding in choppers, even though everyone else hates them for probably the same reasons. They're just so raw and immediate, the avionics equivalent of sleeping outdoors and eating cattail shoots. "Good lord no," Dad says, "do you know what it costs to use those? There's a commuter flight to MSP, it's only about 40 minutes, and Corporal Daily will meet us and help you get settled at home. Sergeant Pancho should be able to start tomorrow morning." "You got her!" "I did!" He's proud of himself. "They did not want to let her go. She must be good." "She is." Reporters catch you at the other end of the flight, as Dad's wheeling you off the plane with Erskin curled up in your lap, sedated to drooling because it's the only way he could handle airports and jouncy little planes and oh god camera flashes. Most of the questions are for Dad, stuff about whether the attack was politically motivated; he doesn't answer, just shoos them out of the way. At some point Becca appears, looking sharp in her dress uniform -- interesting choice, Dad must've ordered it, knowing there'd be cameras -- and takes charge of your chair so Dad can clear the way. You just hold Erskin and try to look brave and trustworthy and American. You probably just succeed in looking tired and worried. Exhausted, you fall asleep as soon as the door of the rental van closes, and the next thing you know Becca and Dad are lifting you into your own bed. There's an IV and a monitor stack where your bedside table usually is, but nothing else has been changed. You heave a huge sigh of relief as Becca settles your groggy darling into the curve of your non-needlepoke arm. "Thank you," you rasp. "Anytime, Captain," she smiles. "You've got a different caretaker coming in the morning." "Yeah... my, my friend from. From deployment." "So I guess this is goodbye." "How about... how about just... seeya. Later. Laters, Corporal." She laughs. "Laters, Captain." You're not supposed to salute an officer in civvies, but she does it anyway. Once she's gone, you breathe in the air of home, and a tension goes out of you. The smells are right, the feel of the bed is right. The sounds are right, the wind in your own personal childhood trees, the lapping of your own personal childhood lake. Maybe it'll all be okay after all. You finally fall into -- not a sickly morphine fugue, or a pained doze, but a real healing sleep.
Towards evening, a dark, expensive car pulls up outside the house. A man— white, well-dressed, a bit short, old enough to have snowy hair but young enough to have a lot of it—lets himself out of the passenger's side, then retrieves a leather dufflebag from the back. Slinging it over his shoulder, he strides up the walk, adjusts his oxblood bowtie and the hang of his auburn greatcoat, and rings the doorbell.
Alex is wearing a sidearm when he answers the door, but he recognizes his visitor through the peephole and flings the door wide. "Aspera, good lord, you've hardly aged a day!"
"Healthy living and virtuous habits," Aspera laughs. He clasps Alex's hand in passing and bulls his way into the house, where he immediately starts stalking from room to room, looking everything over. "I heard you were trying to get in touch, left a message with one of my nephews at the preserve. Had to pop over when I recognized the name. What's going on?"
"Well, first off, your son and mine are dating," Alex smiles as he shuts the door and follows the man. He'd forgotten how forceful and entitled Aspera could be. "I assume you've picked up on the news about the boys having a run-in with a vampire hunter, if you looked us up at all before you came. They're asleep upstairs, recovering."
Aspera puts a framed photo back down on its shelf with a surprised click. "No, I had no idea, I was organizing a boar hunt in Schwarzwald with some of the kids all this past week. We never hear much of anything from Erskin, I don't think he can actually use a phone much less send home a postcard, I should have had him microchipped. He's mixed up with vampires, you say?"
"No, good grief, are those real too? I was speaking metaphorically, the lunatic obviously thought he was Van Helsing or something." He takes a moment to readjust his expectations; knowing Aspera is some kind of superspy, he'd assumed the man would know everything already. But apparently coming to see for himself was step one. Alex guesses that is more reliable than reactivating a decades-old information network. "My son Bel was turned in Afghanistan," he begins. "He met your son Erskin a month or so ago, and they've been traveling and camping ever since. The day before yesterday, as they were hiking the Boundary Waters, they were attacked by a man using silver-plated knives and silver-tipped bullets. Erskin was shot twice and Bel eight times. And stabbed once. But they managed to kill the man and call for rescue. "I brought them here because they're healing too fast, and there's too much public awareness of the case. If that madman had friends -- well, it's just safer here. And I thought you should know." He pauses, then shrugs and admits, "And I'm hoping you can help me keep on top of this. The supernatural was never in my purview, and the boys are scared."
"Oh. Hmm." Aspera runs his hands through his hair, then goes into the kitchen and starts making coffee with Alex's machine. "Are you still with the Airforce? You've got the clearance level to know about all this? I know back when I was on that job with you, you weren't rated yet and not on track for it either, but I suppose having a werewolf in the family is bound to cause a few exceptions." He shrugs. "Good call getting them somewhere private, though— I don't think there's any such thing as too fast when it comes to your own children bouncing back from a bad turn, but those scientist sorts do tend to get excited about it."
"Exactly," Alex says about the healing. Rather than protest the unauthorized use of his coffeemaker, he simply hands Aspera two mugs and says, "I take mine with sugar, thanks." He sits down at the table and toes out a chair for his guest. "I'm a Colonel now. I command the Reserve base at the international airport. Firefighting and search-and-rescue, mostly, but sometimes things do get a little strange. I'm cleared, but I'm not trained. I honestly don't know how any of it works."
Aspera shrugs philosophically, raids the fridge, makes a pleased doggish sort of 'wah!' at finding a container of lunch meat, and sits down with it. "Colonel Kadros. I like that. Very snappy. Well, Colonel, I was turned something like fifty years ago now and I still don't know how all that much of it works. Leave the advanced cogitation to scarier lords and ladies than me, that's for sure. But if you've got anything specific you want to talk about I'll see what I can dig out of my old noodle for you."
He's welcome to all the pastrami he wants if he can provide assistance, or even just make Erskin feel more secure here. Alex knows the boy is nervous all the time, and now he knows there's a very good reason for it. "Well, first of all -- the bullets have all been removed, of course, but they were silver-tipped, and Bel took a silver knife to the liver. Is there anything else we need to do? Is there trace silver in the wounds, and if so, is there a way to flush it out or neutralize it?"
"If he's started healing and the doctors have pulled the bullets and so forth out, anything you do to remove whatever last little particles are in there is just going to irritate the wound site and slow down recovery, more than it would help. Silver operates more like— well, magic, than heavy metals or poison. It makes us—" he waggles a hand from side to side, "—mundane. Where it strikes, while it's in contact, we don't heal the same, we can't change the same. Your boy would have been able to pull any regular hunting knife out of his side at breakfast, be showing off the scar by lunch, and had nothing left to talk about by dinner. It's the silver that makes the damage stick. Do you have any jewelry around? I could give a little demonstration."
"I have silver tableware, but it's honestly not necessary." But Alex gets the box of silver out of the china hutch for him anyway. "So the fact that the weapons were silver is the reason they needed medical attention at all?"
"More or less. If your boy's as sensible as I remember you being, I'm fairly sure he'd have called in for a spot of assistance with eight bullet wounds of any caliber, but it would have been more of a.... take a long weekend, have some beef tea, sort of thing. Erskin's not much of a complainer but I know he nearly got his leg torn off at some point, he was home one summer with a limp. Think that was about the last time any of us saw him, come to think of it, three— four?— years back." He shrugs, unruffled. "Funny little devil. Maybe your son can teach him to write, none of us have." He takes a silver spoon out of the collection, then a pocket knife out of his coat, and gives himself a long scratch with it. Blood beads up along the length, and he pops the back of the spoon against the middle of the line. As they watch, the blood drops slow and stop before any hit the table, then dry to a flakey black, and the flesh underneath comes back together like soft clay. In a minute or two it's only barely pink. Aspera pulls the spoon off the middle of the line. Where it had pressed, the flesh is the intense pink of an allergic reaction, the cut still open, and the blood wells from it bright and fresh. Aspera licks his thumb and wipes at it till it at least the blood stops, and the dark blistered look of the flesh starts to pale. "Damndest thing, eh?" he says. "Never heard an explanation for the phenomenon that made a lick of sense."
