(xiii)
-
"She wants something to love, I think," said the cat. "Something that isn't her. She might want something to eat as well. It's hard to tell with creatures like that."
-
"Look, I didn't do shit."
The boy was trying for cocky and missing it by miles. But then, Tony mused, not many people were able to manage cockyness when faced with Gibbs' best glare.
"Uh-huh." Gibbs was not convinced.
"I was there, yeah, but I didn't do anything!"
And that was probably pretty close to the truth, Tony thought. Charlotte was selfish like that. In her sandbox, you played by her rules or you didn't play at all, and this Aaron Mathews may have been useful enough and amusing enough for her to let him watch, but she'd be reluctant to share a kill. The first one, yes, to tie Aaron tighter to her and make it impossible for him to betray her. The others...she would have wanted those all to herself.
"Which still makes you an accomplice. Several counts of first degree murder, attempted murder...it's not looking good for you, kid."
"And you think that scares me, Mister Government Agent?"
"Yeah. I think that scares you."
And it did. Tony could see it, smell it, even through the one way mirror in the interrogation room. But it didn't scare him as much as it should have. There was a triumphant gleam in the boy's eyes when he looked up through his messy hair, one that said he had something up his sleeve.
Tony had a sinking feeling that he knew exactly what that something was. And when he led Aaron Mathews back to the holding cell, he got it confirmed.
"She bit you," he stated.
"Yeah," Aaron leered. "You jealous? She picked me."
He was sickened. The taint of a sloppy change-bite was all over the boy. Not enough for a successful turn, just enough to kill him. Slowly and painfully. Tony had no doubt Charlotte had done it on purpose. Promising eternity by her side, when in reality it was a clever and cruel way to get rid of evidence. Aaron wouldn't live to see the trial.
The full moon would kill him.
-
Falling asleep the night before had been a lovely experience, Abby thought.
Drifting off with her fingers carding through soft charcoal fur, a heavy head in her lap and a cold, wet nose snuffling her in the side, safe and warm - she could get used to that. She only hoped that next time, he'd change just because he wanted to be cuddly, not because he was bursting with conflicted feelings and couldn't stop shaking.
He explained it to her, in between bouts of restless pacing, the change and the shift, the physical transformation and the mental one, and how they didn't necessarily accompany each other. How they both blurred his human self in different ways. The fierce simplicity of the shift, where rationality flew out the window and left him running on instinct and sensation, the world roughly divided into three categories: pack and prey and threat. The dreamy crystalline calm of the change, where everything was clear and brilliantly abstract, and any feelings that weren't wolf feelings, didn't relate directly to the senses, were examined but not truly experienced (kind of like a furry four-legged Vulcan, he said), alien human emotion just catalogued and stored, like they didn't fit in a canine body. The change was easy enough to control, but the shift took focus and effort.
He said that it was a constant struggle to keep the mental balance between wolf and human. That fighting the shift had driven many weres insane before they learned control, making them the killers of a thousand horror stories. It's like the dark side of the Force, he explained, only not dark as much as...wild. But then, wild is pretty much the same as dark in this day and age.
And then he apologized for referring to both Star Trek and Star Wars in the same conversation, and asked if she minded if he changed (if she minded if he changed? He must have forgotten who he was talking to. Eh, hello? Would she say no to a big fluffy cuddly wolf?) because he kind of wanted to be nothuman right then, and she could definitely see how being nothuman would be helpful after telling someone something like what he'd just told her about Charlotte.
Wolves were, Abby quickly decided, the best cuddlers ever. At least if they were Tony.
Waking up in the morning had been just as lovely as falling asleep, although lovely of a completely different kind, because sometime in the night Tony had changed back, and Abby woke to find herself tangled in miles of barely covered Italian stud. And he was very studly indeed, judging by the heat of the morning hardon pressed into the small of her back. It sent one of those carbonated red thrills of power up her spine. I can make your body go out of control… Her fingers itched to reach behind and touch him, to find out exactly how to drive him mad other than wearing that dress he really liked, but, to quote Dr. Phil, she wasn't sure they were at that point in their relationship yet. So instead she played an intense round of ‘How much wriggling does it take to wake a sleeping werewolf?'
Quite a lot, it turned out. But that could be because just as she was really getting into the game he growled in his sleep and tugged her closer, making his cock settle in the crack of her ass, and that made her wriggling turn into some sort of sinuous rocking, which was probably against the rules of the game. …Okay, so you can make my body go out of control too. But she didn't really care, because she had bigger problems, like for example the fact that the Force was not working, because Tony's right hand stubbornly refused to slide up those few inches to her left breast, no matter how much she glared at it.
Moving it manually was definitely against the rules of the game, and felt kind of meh, like cheating at solitaire and then going ‘Yay, I won!' like her grandmother did. But maybe if she just…
Then her Batman alarm clock blared, and the bat signal appeared on the ceiling, and Tony sat up so abruptly she got dislodged from the couch and landed on her ass on the floor. Which was so not the way she'd imagined things going. And she didn't even get a good sneak peek, because of the Evil Blanket of Concealment that draped itself aggravatingly over the interesting bits.
It was all horribly frustrating.
Luckily, the lab was empty now, she had no urgent tests to run, she knew where the security camera blind spot was, and she'd always had an excellent imagination.
Now then…
"Bert! This really isn't something polite hippos should watch. Turn around, please."
-
At the end of the day, Tony showed up in her lab, like he usually did.
"Are you free tonight?"
She fluttered her eyelashes at him. "For you, Tony? Always. What are we doing?"
"Apparently," he said wryly, "we are going out to dinner with the delightful Miss Josephine Winterbourne. Doesn't look like I've got any choice in the matter. She says it's to take our minds off the case for a while, but don't be fooled. She wants to check you out. She'll interrogate you worse than Gibbs, and when she's decided you're up to her standards, and that you won't try to kill me in my sleep, she will without a doubt tell you a bunch of painfully embarrassing stories about me. All under the guise of teaching you how to ‘handle me' better. Not that I think you need any lessons. Then she's going to make me pay for dinner. I'm probably going to regret this evening for the rest of the century, at least. How does that sound to you?"
Abby smirked. "It sounds great."
He sighed sadly. It wasn't very convincing. "Women. You'll be the end of me. Pick you up at eight?"
-
Dinner was beyond awesome. The food was delicious, Josie was a complete sweetheart (even at first, when she was channeling the Spanish Inquisition) and Tony got her a huge sundae with cherries on top for dessert. All in all, it did take their minds off the case – Tony smiled for real and Abby rambled excitedly - even if Josie had ulterior motives.
And it was a very educational evening. Abby was still happily sorting all the new information in her head when Tony parked the Mustang on the lot outside her building.
They got out of the car, and Abby was just about to ask if he wanted to come in for a while, when she heard it.
A sweet, lilting soprano, clear in the still night air.
"Get down, get down, little Henry Lee
And stay all night with me
You won't find a girl in this damn world
That will compare with me
And the wind did howl, and the wind did blow
La la la la la
La la la la lee
A little bird lit down on Henry Lee…"
Tony stepped forward, eyes intent on something she couldn't see. "Stay behind me, Abs."
And then there she was, Tony's beloved nightmare, in a white summer dress patterned with tiny blue flowers, her long blonde hair falling free down to her waist, her eyes very green and her mouth very red. And she was smiling, sweet as any angel.
Oh, fuck this is bad. "Tony…"
"Yeah. Just…stay behind me, okay?"
Charlotte laughed, delightedly. "What's this? A new toy, Antonio? Don't worry, I shan't break it."
"No. You won't." Tony growled, and his eyes flickered gold, filled with dark promise.
"Touchy, touchy, darling brother," she scolded, frowning prettily. "There's no need to be so hostile."
"No?"
"No! I just want to talk to you."
"Alright. What is it that you want, Charlotte?" he asked wearily.
For a moment, there was an expression of absolute desolation on her face, but it was just as quickly covered with the mask of sparkling mirth. "Why, I want you to come home, of course! I miss you. You'll come, won't you?"
His smile then was sad, and strangely compassionate. "No, Lottie. I'm not coming home with you."
Charlotte sighed, deeply. "I was afraid you were going to say that, amato." The dress slid off her shoulders in a whisper of cloth and pooled around her feet. "I take back what I said about no need for hostility."
Then she blurred and was gone, a wolf the colour of wheat and honey taking her place, instantly launching itself straight at Tony's throat. Abby gasped and stumbled back, but Tony's eyes had gone completely golden now, and he caught the she-wolf in the air with seemingly no effort, throwing her halfway across the parking lot. "Get in the car. Lock the doors," he said, in a voice very far from human, tore off the grey Armani shirt and the Hugo Boss jeans and changed, just in time to meet Charlotte's next attack.
Abby scrambled into the front seat, shutting out the vicious snarls and threatening growls of the kind that starts in the back of one throat and ends up in the back of another, but unlike horror movies on tv, it didn't get less scary with the sound off.
Neither of them were fighting fair, both biting and tearing and scratching at anything within reach, fangs glinting in the yellow glow of the street light. Fair was a far too human concept for Tony now, and Charlotte probably hadn't ever known the meaning of it.
They tumbled and rolled on the dusty gravel, a blur of dark and bright, charcoal and honey, and Abby was beginning to think it would never end. There was blood staining their furs now, and they were both limping slightly, but still the fight showed no signs of stopping.
And then it did. Tony had Charlotte pinned to the ground, his jaws around her neck and his weight holding her down, but she wasn't giving up, squirming and writhing and not getting anywhere.
Suddenly she fell limp, pliant in his grip, and the brief moment of surprised hesitation that gained her was all she needed. She blurred and changed again, so white and deceptively fragile against Tony's dark fur, and then there was a flash of metal in her hand, and a second later that metal was buried deep in Tony's chest.
No.
He staggered backwards and fell down in a graceless heap.
No!
Charlotte picked up her dress, brushed it off and put it on. Tony tracked her movements with yellow-green eyes, eyes that were becoming noticeably heavier with every second. She smiled and knelt down by his head, petting him fondly as his breathing grew slower, whispering to him. Abby's mad lip reading skills kicked in then, despite the shock and the white noise and the constant background scream of nonononononono.
"There, there, darling brother. Don't fret. Hush, amato. I'll see you soon."
She gave him one final scratch behind the ear and then stood, waved to Abby where she sat paralyzed in the car, and then left. And on the gravel, in a growing pool of blood, the great grey wolf lay silent and still.
To be continued.
Author's Chapter Notes:
there are both rather nice and very bad things happening. o.0
Chapter End Notes:
still no ownage, so don't get with the sue-age. and no sewage either, thankyou. this chapter has fairly mild almost-sex. you have been warned.