Excerpt: Silent Dogs and Still Water

Unconsciousness hit more quickly than Crowe might have expected, lingering to give him a cruel taste of what it might have been like to have actually gotten a reasonable night’s sleep before he found himself swimming up out of it as though struggling his way to the surface of dark waters.

He was being watched, he realized without having opened his eyes. The pressure of a gaze resting on him was a very particular sort of weight, familiar now after so many years as a student under the strict tutelage of the Black Lotus.

Slitting his eyes open, he scanned the room, tensed and ready without giving any indication of being so. But when he spotted the watcher, he knew immediately who it had to be. A naked, shaggy-haired boy, possibly twelve or thirteen years old, sitting on the edge of the bed as though he wasn’t certain he ought to be touching any of the surfaces. His dark eyes rested uncertainly on Crowe, and when he realized he was being watched in turn, Crowe saw his fingers curl just slightly on the bedclothes.

“So you do remember how to take human form,” he commented, his voice hoarse with not quite enough sleep. “That’s good.”

After a moment, as though the words took some time to process, the boy nodded.

He can shift, and he understands spoken language… That’s better than it might have been. Slowly, Crowe pushed himself into a sitting position, sliding back to rest his spine against the headboard. It added a little bit of distance between them, which he suspected might be welcomed. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Suwa…” the boy murmured softly, shaping the syllables as though they tasted unfamiliar to him. “Naoki.”

“Suwa Naoki,” Crowe repeated, unable to keep from chuckling softly to himself, amused by the whole bizarre situation. “My name is Crowe.”

“You’re… like me.” For a moment, Naoki’s gaze darted around the room, surveying it with some minor amount of suspicion. The way he spoke was halting, as though he’d had little cause to do it. Given Crowe’s lack of familiarity with Japanese, he suspected that it was something of a boon that the boy was probably not going to be inclined to say complicated things.

“Yes.” Crowe inclined his head in a single nod. The word werewolf had always struck him as so vulgar, he had never been keen to use it to describe himself. It reminded him of the wolf-men popularized in terrible horror movies, nothing like the real grace of a shapeshift.

Naoki considered the word, looking thoughtful, saying nothing for a long moment.

“Can you tell me what happened at the church?” Crowe questioned when the silence creeping through the room between them had grown too thick for even him to bear.

The boy’s midnight-blue gaze dropped to his hands, his expression taking on an even more sober edge than it had previously. Crowe wasn’t used to feeling anything for anyone save himself so the sudden rush of unidentifiable emotion that surged through him at the sight of the uncomfortable child was a not-entirely-welcome surprise.

“There was…” Naoki began, then stopped, seeming to lose confidence in his ability to express whatever it was that had happened to destroy the church. “She was killed.” His expression twisted, leaving him baring his teeth at the carpet. “She was my friend.”

The nun, clearly. Crowe remained silent, letting Naoki tell as much of the story as he wanted in his own time.

“It was… for orphans,” he went on, seeming to collect himself a little, visibly burying his reaction to repeating the night’s events. “She said we were all her children. The other children didn’t know… They thought I was only a dog. She knew. She said… stay quiet. The truth would scare them.”

Crowe shifted position a little, hugging a knee to his chest, listening. “She taught you to speak, then?” He longed to bombard the boy with questions – how long had this been going on? How long had Naoki been walking between worlds? But he managed to restrain himself.

Naoki nodded. “Yes. At night, when the others were sleeping.” He paused, then reiterated, very softly, “She was my friend.”

Whether that was in fact the case was a debate that Crowe did not plan on having with the boy, though in the private confines of his thoughts, he rather doubted it. Why had the nun insisted on keeping Naoki as a pet, rather than letting the other children believe that he was one of them? Why instruct the boy to remain on four legs? It was understandable that the woman herself had likely been somewhat frightened to discover the reality of such an unreal creature as Naoki, but in that case, why bother teaching him how to be human?

“When did you first…” Crowe found himself coming up short on the question, missing words. “Become a wolf,” he managed, somewhat lamely, cursing the fact that his ability to work with the language became considerably poorer when he was this distracted.

“Always?” Naoki attempted, looking honestly confused. “I... became a human. Before that, I was a wolf.”

Which really went no distance to explaining the boy’s prodigious shapeshifting talent. But Crowe supposed that wasn’t truly what he needed to know at the moment. “You said your friend was killed,” he mused, watching Naoki carefully to gauge the potential for dangerous reaction. “Who killed her?”

“A man.” Naoki’s brow furrowed and he made a small, frustrated gesture with one hand. “I don’t know him.”

“Did he also burn the church?” It might have been pushing the point too much too soon, but now that Naoki was talking, Crowe wanted to learn as much as he could.

Naoki shook his head vigorously, his black hair falling to shade one eye as he regarded Crowe with the same sorrowful expression he had worn as a wolf. “I was so angry. Things just… shook. And fell apart.”

It didn’t explain whether or not the boy knew what he was capable of, but it seemed almost a certainty that the destruction had indeed been Naoki’s doing. Which made him even more of a prize as far as Crowe was concerned. Though precisely what he was going to do with the boy was something he had yet to decide.