Free Dark Currents by Jacqueline Carey

on what he’d said today, even if he were interested in me, it could never go anywhere. I thought he was a serial dater because if he got too close to anyone, they’d start to realize he vanished once a month during the full moon.
    Hell, if I was honest with myself, I didn’t know how much of my attraction to him was because he wasn’t a full-blooded human. I’d dated a few guys over the years . . . Well, no. Even that wasn’t really true. I’d never had an actual boyfriend. I’d hooked up with a few guys over the years, but there had usually been a fair amount of drinking involved, at least on their end. Ultimately there was always a spark missing, a level of passion I hungered for that went beyond the mere mortal. And yes, there was usually a point where they freaked out on me, and yes, it had a lot to do with the tail. Well, that and what it represented, I guess.
    At least a guy who turned into a wolf once a month wasn’t likely to freak out over one small posterior appendage. But that was no reason to throw my BFF under the bus. For all I knew, Cody and Jen might have dated for a month and parted amicably. Or maybe they would have fallen in love, and he would have bucked clan tradition.
    I doubted it.
    More likely Jen would have ended up like the bartender Rosalind who dated Cody’s brother, still wistful and pining fifteen years later.
    I sighed and turned off the TV.
    I could tell myself that all day long, but even if it was true, I hadn’t done the right thing. My loyalty should have been to Jen, not to Cody and an unspoken eldritch code. I shouldn’t have interfered. I should have told her the truth and let her make her own choices.
    Too late now.
    I poured myself a couple inches of scotch and put Nina Simone on the stereo. She sang in a lower octave than most women, deep and soulful. Throughout her life, she’d struggled with the mortal demons of mental illness. Tonight, the sound of her voice soothed an ache in me. “It’s nobody’s fault but mine,” Nina sang, commiserating with my guilty conscience.
    Wandering onto the porch, I watched the afterglow fade in the west, and listened to the sounds of Pemkowet on a summer evening.
    It sounded just like last night.
    A young man was dead, and most of the world went on, oblivious. I went back to the living room, flipped open my own case file. Thad Vanderhei stared up at me from his DMV photo, a bland smirk on his face and a faint impression of a circle flattening his hair, suggesting he’d taken off a baseball cap to have the photo taken.
    On the stereo, accompanied by a spare, haunting piano arrangement, Nina confirmed in a mournful tone that if she died and her soul was lost, it was nobody’s fault but hers.
    I brushed Thad’s face with one fingertip. “What did you do?” I murmured. “What were you up to, and whose fault was it?”
    No one but Nina Simone answered.

Nine
    O nce again, I was awakened from sleep in the wee hours of the night, this time by Mogwai turning from a warm, dense ball of fur curled against my side into a hissing, spitting, feral creature uttering a low, unearthly wail. Leaping from the bed, Mogwai dashed toward the screened porch.
    I sat bolt upright. “What the—”
    Outside the screened porch, there was a clatter and a clash, followed by the sound of a door banging open, a rising guttural roar, an alarmed human-sounding shout, and the sound of running feet pounding down the alley.
    Yanking on a pair of jeans below the tank top I slept in, I grabbed my phone, unlocked the door to my apartment, and ran downstairs.
    Mrs. Browne was in the alley, a broom clutched in her gnarled hands and raised like a club. There was no trace now of the sweet little old lady she usually appeared to be. The lines on her wizened face had hardened into something ancient and fierce and dangerous, filled with all the righteous fury of a brownie protecting its household.
    That was another reason I usually felt safe in my apartment at night.