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“It’s not that easy,” Tina said, soft, serious, diverging from her bubbly on-screen persona. “It’s not like making a phone call. So, no. I can’t do it.”
Peter grit his teeth. He was almost shaking. “But I know you can do it. Please, I don’t want a séance, I just need . . .” And he couldn’t say it. Couldn’t finish the thought, and none of us tried to finish it for him. He could have meant anything: closure, comfort, some assurance that his brother hadn’t forgotten him, when all the evidence suggested that he had.
He turned away, hiding eyes that were shining with tears.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, and couldn’t tell if he’d heard me. “But if you’ve been following us, you know what a really bad time this is.”
Jules said, “Right. We’re in the middle of something here. But later, maybe we can set up an experiment—”
“It doesn’t work on command,” Tina said. “I can’t promise anything.”
Peter had pulled himself together, but that only meant he was back to his surly, fidgeting self. “Thanks. Don’t do me any favors or anything. I wouldn’t want to put you out.” He turned and stalked out.
I went after him. I wasn’t letting him get away again.
“Peter, wait!” I said before he was halfway down the sidewalk, and I must have growled it, because he stopped in his tracks. I faced him. “I need something, too. I need to know about T.J.”
He didn’t answer—but then, he didn’t leave, either, so I begged.
“Please,” I said. “He was my best friend. I survived becoming a werewolf because of him, because he helped me. And now I don’t even have a picture to remember him by. Please tell me about him.” Watching him, face locked in a scowl, head bent, unwilling to stand tall and look at me, I thought this was what T.J. must have looked like at this age. Before he mellowed, before he grew comfortable in his skin. Before coming to grips with what he was. Peter hadn’t acquired any of that confidence yet. But I wasn’t going to let him walk away. I blocked his path to the parking lot.
He took a breath, steeling himself. “I’ve got some things I can show you. They’re out in my bike.”
Of course he rode a motorcycle, just like T.J. had. We walked to the parking lot, where he’d pulled his bike into the slot next to my car. It was an older model, not too big, not a muscle, speed, or status bike. Something tough and functional, with a helmet strapped to the back and saddlebags over the rear tire. T.J. hadn’t worn a helmet. As a tougher-than-human werewolf, he hadn’t thought he needed one.
Peter opened one of the saddlebags and removed a thick accordion file, setting it on the bike’s seat like it was a desk. “It’s been impossible getting a straight answer about him from anyone. I don’t know why I thought the psychic would be willing to help.”
“They’re good people,” I said. “They just don’t want to treat it like a tool. It’s not an exact science.”
“It’s like being a kid again. It’s like everyone’s keeping secrets, everyone knows something, but they won’t tell you, because you’re not old enough, or smart enough. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not knowing anything.”
“You seem to be a pretty good detective. You figured out their secret. You’ve figured out a lot of this.” I nodded at the file.
“And if he were alive I could have just asked him. If I’d found him sooner—” He shook his head. His frown was deep. “He was eight years older than me, so we weren’t real close. But it’s like you said, he looked out for me. Helped me. He was good at that. Our parents weren’t too involved, I guess you’d say. Kind of distant. We had two sisters, but I couldn’t talk to them, so I always went to Ted. When he turned eighteen, he came out. Announced he was gay over the dinner table to the whole family. Mom and Dad didn’t take it so well.” He chuckled; the sound was bitter. “That’s an understatement. They kicked him out. Wouldn’t speak to him again. I think he expected it, because he already had his bag packed. He left, and that’s the last time I ever saw him. But God, I would have gone with him. I wanted so badly to go with him.
“We weren’t allowed to even say his name at home. I kept hoping he’d call, or maybe come back to take me with him. I left home last year. That’s when I really started looking. Trying to track him down. I didn’t think it would be this hard, but he didn’t leave much of a trail. No credit card, no jobs—he only ever worked for cash under the table. I can’t imagine him in a life like that. I don’t think I ever really knew him.” He did wipe a tear away, then.
“But you tracked him this far.”
“By luck, mostly. The name isn’t all that common.” He pulled pages out of the file. T.J.’s life, all wrapped up in a neat little package. “He was in motocross racing for a while, working as a mechanic, fixing bikes, that sort of thing. I found some people who knew him then.” He showed me sheets of paper with names and contact information typed out, a few pages with handwritten notes, probably from interviews, records of conversations. Grainy black-and-white photos—photocopies of photos. He set them aside to reveal a couple more pages, these ones typed forms. “I didn’t start to worry about him until I found these. A couple years after he left home, he had an HIV test. It came back positive. A second one confirmed the positive.?
??
I shook my head. This definitely wasn’t the T.J. I knew. “T.J. wasn’t HIV positive—I would have known that. Aren’t these things supposed to be confidential?”
He turned a cocky smile, crinkling his eyes—and for a flash looked just like his brother, the way I remembered him. My breath caught.
“I got a job at the records department of the clinic. That’s how crazy I’ve been over this. But here’s the thing.”
A few more pages down in the stack, he pulled out another sheet, an almost identical medical form. “About eight months later, another test came back negative. The odds are slim, but I’m guessing the first two were both false positives, or lab error. Something like that. So he wasn’t really HIV positive. If he was, there’d be more medical files on him. Wouldn’t there? But that third test is the last time he ever went to a doctor, I think.”
Holding up the pages, I stared at them side by side, my mind tumbling. Lightbulbs of understanding flared to life. T.J.’s life, gathered together in a stack of papers. It shouldn’t have been able to explain anything, but it did. It explained everything.
“The first two tests weren’t wrong,” I said softly.
“How can you tell?”
I pointed to the dates on the last two pages, the tests that showed the switch from positive to negative, from HIV infected to healthy. Eight years ago now. Just a few years before I met him. I explained, “Within this stretch of time, he was infected with lycanthropy. That’s when he became a werewolf. Lycanthropy makes someone almost invulnerable. They’re very hard to injure, they heal rapidly. They don’t get diseases. He cured himself of HIV by infecting himself with lycanthropy.” And how had he found out about werewolves? How had he found one who would bite him without killing him? The address on the letterhead of the test forms was in California. What had brought him to Denver? And what about the positive test in the first place—what kind of trouble had T.J.—a gay kid kicked out of the house, maybe living on the streets, doing who knew what—gotten into that led to getting HIV?
