Free Helix: Plague of Ghouls by Pat Flewwelling

pushed his slipping glasses further up toward the bridge of his nose. The spectacles were replacements for the ones he’d lost when fighting Digger, but these slipped as badly as the old ones. “It keeps me sane.”
    “You could help Shuffle build his house.”
    “And once it’s built, then what? No, I need an actual job. Even if I can never leave Wynd—Wyrd headquarters—I have to earn my keep somehow.”
    Unless they’re only keeping you busy until they decide how to execute us all .
    The Padre explained that he approached Haberman directly with the idea: he’d learn counselling and religion, so that he could help emergent lycanthropes come to terms with their new state of being. Like the rest of Grey’s uninformed test subjects, he’d been torn from his life, thrust into a completely new body—one that forced him to grow a tail every twenty-one days, and hours after his first full transformation, the Padre had been chucked into a military-style quarantine to fend for himself among cannibals. The Padre understood the value of a kind word, a little truth, and some direction during the early stages of a lycanthrope’s new life. Haberman likely didn’t give a shit what the Padre did with his time, but if studies kept him out of sight and downwind, then more power to him.
    During his explanation, the Padre’s smile diminished, and he began to look more like his old self, slow-tempered and level-headed, but tending toward the morose.
    “That good, huh?” Ishmael asked.
    “I don’t think I’m cut out for studying,” the Padre confessed.
    “Give it time. You’ve got enough of that, so might as well make use of it.”
    “It was a bad idea.”
    “I don’t think it was a bad idea at all,” Ishmael said. Of course, sermons full of hellfire, love, and redemption wouldn’t have made much of an impact on someone like Bridget, who’d just as soon have punched the Padre in the mouth, but for others . . .
    The Padre fixed his glasses. “The more I look, the less I find.” He began to look hurt, too. “And the more questions I ask, the more people tell me that, no matter what else I become every twenty-one days, no matter if I killed my own brother, no matter how many other people I killed, because of the kind of man I am, I’m condemned.”
    “Ishmael,” Angie Burley shouted from another open door at the end of the hall. “Lord, but you do take your time.”
    The Padre looked over his shoulder like a scolded boy.
    “Come on now,” Burley said, though it sounded more like “caw-mown-nao”. She tossed hair over her shoulder and sniffed impatiently. “No sense givin’ the whole damn briefing by hollerin’ it down the hallway.” She was average-to-tall in height, with lean shoulders and very wide hips, blunt fingers and crossed arms, broad cheekbones, skin as dark as espresso beans, and proud brown eyes. Now a werewolf and ostensibly killed in the line of duty, she took no bullshit from anybody, no matter how big they were or what they looked like in fur and fangs. As a werewolf, she had a classic, enviable wolfen form—tail and all—but she wasn’t half as much fun as when she was human.
    And in terms of usurpers, Ishmael wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to take his place on the Council. She knew her job, she knew strategy, and she knew how to tell someone to go and kill someone else. She hated it, but she did it very well, and now that the post was hers, she’d fight Ishmael to keep it.
    “You too, Padre. Come on,” Burley said.
    The Padre tilted his head. “Who, me?”
    “You see any other would-be priests runnin’ around Varco Lake? Yes, you!”
    “What do you need him for?” Ishmael asked.
    Burley rolled her eyes. “ Confession , you sumbitch, now get in here! Lord cross my eyes, I cain’t believe how slow y’all are up here.”
    “After you,” Ishmael said, pointing the way for the Padre.
    “Where’s Holly?” Burley asked, as Ishmael and the Padre entered the briefing