Volya zeroed in on the river once he left the house. It wasn't the Don River, but it was a pretty place with grass to tickle his ankles, giving way to rocky river-cut. Some shrubs clustered along the water-line, even a stand of cattails. He found an opening in the thicket and plopped down on the dry pebbles. After a while, his eyes started hunting for the really good ones to toss into the water. The first pebble broke the shimmering surface and ploinked under to lie at the bottom of the river for all eternity. He watched the circle widen and dug for another. Toss by toss, his heart shrunk back from the critical mass to its normal size without exploding.

Grab a pebble, toss it, watch the circles. That kept everything quiet inside him: the voices, the heart, the pain.

He stretched his arm out in search of his next missile, when the crunch of footsteps alerted him to someone's approach. A heavier walk, longer stride, so a man.

"Leave me alone, Liam," Volya snapped without turning, but knew he was mistaken before the words were out of his mouth. This wasn't how Liam walked, and he didn't stink of machine grease and cigarettes. The coward sent Damir to retrieve him.

"Can I smoke?" Damir asked, ignoring Volya's scowl, and the shout meant for Liam.

"I'm told America is a free country."

He also figured that Damir would do whatever he wanted in any country. The cast of his squared shoulders, the lazy way he walked—it all hinted at someone who held the freedom to do as he wished in highest regard. Volya liked that about the man.

"Ha-hah," Damir replied. He sat cross-legged and dug up a misshapen pack of Marlboro from the breast-pocket of his khaki shirt. He tapped its bottom until a cigarette popped out, crumpled the pack and stuffed it back absentmindedly. His dark eyes flickered, then the lighter flickered, as he steepled his hands over the cigarette to shield it from a gust of wind.

For a while they enjoyed the companionable silence, interrupted only by the splashes Volya's pebbles made, birds' chattering unhappily from the reeds after each disturbance, and Damir's puffs.

"Don't let the past reel you in," Damir advised between two particularly satisfying drags.

Volya honored the platitude with the scoff it richly deserved. What did he even have besides his tragic past? His healthy appetite?

Toshka, the inner voice supplied, sending goosebumps over his arms.

Oh, so now it's Toshka, not Liam, who's my kin. Volya snapped back telepathically and rubbed his skin to erase the stupid goosebumps.

Don't look at me, I just follow your lead, the voice replied philosophically of the river's gurgling and the rustle of the cattails.

How am I even supposed to frigging look at the incorporeal sound in my head? With my third eye or something?

You'll see me soon, the voice promised.

Yeah, right. What are you anyway?

There was no reply. To get at the voice, Volya imagined that the voice belonged to a slug, a fat, lazy slug delighting in his misery.

Not a muscle twitched in Damir's face, while Volya debated with the leech on his soul. He just sat there and filtered smoke through his nostrils. A patient son of a gun.

Silence got to Volya first. "Do you believe any of it? That I'm a werewolf and that there's a magic curse?"

He slanted his eyes to watch for any reaction he had missed, but no, the guy smoked and surveyed the aspens on the opposite bank.

"Anabelle is a centaur," Damir pointed out helpfully.

"I know!" This time he didn't just throw the rock into the water. He swung as hard as he could to hit the other shore. It fell woefully short, and ploinked. "I just don't want to believe it. I don't understand how a bunch of scientists can take werewolves seriously. Doesn't matter if it was thousands of years ago. The world couldn't have changed that much, plus, there would be fossils or something."

"Hmm. There was a skull once thought to be a missing link. It turned out to be a human cranium with a chimpanzee's jaw," Damir said.

"My point exactly!" Volya exclaimed and tossed in three stones at once. If there was trout in that river, it would be very cross with him. "Anabelle must be playing them, right?"

The brat was capable of it, that's for sure. Maybe she yearned for her father's love or something. Good for her, if so. As long as she wasn't playing him, she was welcome to mess with her mother's already tentative grip on reality.

"If you're curious, let them pay you to satisfy your curiosity. Win-win." Damir took another pull on his cigarette.

Volya rubbed clammy, muddy hands on his jeans in irritation. "Damn it, Damir, whose side are you on?"

Everything he knew about Damir added up to him expecting the man to ignore his question as a pointless waste of oxygen. But, at length, he replied. "'A chemist who is not a mystic is not a real chemist. He doesn't comprehend it.' Do you know who said that?"

"No."

"Albert Hoffman, the chemist who discovered LSD."

Volya gaped at him. How did this piece of trivia help his situation? And now he was bound to remember it forever. "What does this have to do with me, Damir?"

"You're the gateway to a completely different way to study nature." The smoke from Damir's cigarette rose into the blue sky, dancing with the breeze. So long as it didn't blow it right into Volya's nostrils the stench was bearable. "Mysteries of the universe draw the scientists, Volya. Always did, always will. Whether you want it or not, you're one of those mysteries and you push the boundaries of what we think is possible by your existence."

"Cripes. But I don't feel all that different from other humans. Not like Anabelle at any rate."

"Maybe they can make you transform into a wolf or grow a bushy tail. Or give the poor girl her human legs back. Maybe they can't. The important thing is that they envision these possibilities," Damir said. "That moves science to a new level."

Playing a devil's advocate, are you? "So you think, I should sacrifice myself for science's sake?"

"Sacrifice? No." The Marlboro had finally burned to the filter, so the environmentally-conscious philosopher squashed it against a stone and hid the butt in his pocket. "Think of yourself first. Of what you need."

"Like forcing this bunch of crazies to find my mother and sister for me?"

Damir patted his pockets. There were like three on his jacket, a bunch on his jeans. His hands shook a little, because he couldn't locate his stupid Marlboro fast enough.

Volya cringed. "What are you, a pack a day?"

"Says who, my insurance broker?" But Damir abandoned his frantic search and clasped his hands behind his back. "Anyway. If you actually want them to keep digging into your family, then push them into doing it."

"You disapprove?"

"Not my place to judge. I'm not you... but if I were you, I wouldn't focus on your family."

"What else is there for me?"

"I gather singing is an excuse to bring you over, not your deepest heart's desire, right?"

"Totally." Volya wanted to deal with numbers. Numbers always added up when you were honest. Songs never did.

"Then screw the singing. Use whatever other resources they offer you and ask for more. Internship, scholarship, their learned company—whatever you can handle. Your Baba Masha won't feed you forever."

Damir sounded a bit like Toshka, if Toshka was thirty-something and jaded.

"Is that what you're doing, Damir? Using their resources to get your Ph.D.?"

Damir unclamped his hands, picked a pebble and tossed it after one of Volya's. He made it skip three times before gravity won: quite a feat on the rushing water. "Yes."

"Really?" Volya's lips puckered in annoyance. "Then it has nothing to do with Marina?"

"Nothing," said Damir flatly.

The very absence of expression on his face told Volya that it was everything. "You're lying to me. People did nothing but lie to me here."

Damir lifted his eyes to the sky, as if searching for the long-gone smoke. He sighed. "Okay. Marina and I, we started in the same year at the university."

"So what? Lots of people do."

"Yeah, sure." He gave Volya a stink-eye, like, if he didn't want to know, why did he ask?

"Sorry." Volya chuckled helplessly. "Sometimes I just can't keep my mouth shut."

Damir flexed his shoulders. "There was a field school after the second year. Marina and I, we could have been an item then, I suppose. But I never felt freer in my life than at that dig. I certainly had no desire to go back to sitting all winter on the school bench."

"I know the feeling," Volya admitted. Only, against his instincts, he always returned indoors in September. Browned by the sun, lips chapped, hair—too long and matted, resentful, he sat down and tried to pay attention to whatever dross they drilled through his skull. Intimate life of butterflies, or Sparta's wars with Athens, or conjugations. Sometimes he had fun with it. Sometimes he just watched Toshka.

"It's such a drag, really. First, you are in school to get into the uni to get out of the military conscription. Then you are in the uni for years..." Damir shook his head. "Well, I've thought, to hell with it all, I can just leave. Go to Altai or Siberia, so long as it is beyond the Ural Mountains."

"Cool." It sounded cooler than anything Volya had done in his life, tied to Baba Masha's apron's strings by his need to eat differently.

"It was," Damir agreed. "But, naturally, what money I had, ran out."

It felt good to chat about normal things, like mucking up your life in a good old-fashioned way, without help from some genocidal horse-lords and special genes.

"Yeah. Everyone needs to eat." Even the regular, non-Alpha, people—and Volya understood this limitation all too well.

"In those parts, the only way for a guy to feed himself was not much different from the army. Or worse, depending how you look at it. So, I faced the music, went back, carried a machine gun and dug whatever I was told to dig for two years."

"Crap."

"When I returned, I had to start the Uni from scratch. Marina was married by then. Still is. The end."

Like hell it was. It sounded more like a beginning of something torturous. "Don't know what you or anyone else would see in her."

Damir laughed long and loud. "Most people would say the opposite. Wouldn't see what she found in me, a guy with neither a yard nor a fence post."

"Most people are dumber than this rock." Volya lifted the unintelligent rock so Damir could see its speckled sides, then tossed it. It went down like, well, a dumb rock it was.

"She married well, to her professor, who was the preeminent expert in the field. He made her talents obvious to everyone, and shortened the academic ladder by a few rungs." Damir might have said something else, but maybe it finally had occurred to him that he was pouring his soul out to a seventeen-year-old, possibly a werewolf.

He finished abruptly. "Whatever. The truth is, there is nothing between us."

From a certain perspective, the outcome-oriented one, it was nothing. No relationship, nor marriage, nor kids torn in half by the feuding parents. But if that same rule was applied to Toshka and him, it would also sum up to nothing. And Volya's gut said that was a lie invented by people who had more. For some reason humans delighted in kicking the less fortunate. 

"It's not nothing."

"Thanks," Damir guffawed. "But back to your case, here is another reason for you to ignore the past, hit the books and watch out for yourself. I can't recommend ditch-digging for two of your formative years. And the machine guns—even less, ever."

"Thanks for the heads-up, but I'm exempt from the military service for health reasons. Nobody wants me, not even my mother or the Russian Army."

"Anders does. Lydia and Anabelle do." Damir clapped him on the shoulder, pushed to his feet and extended his hand invitingly. "Friends?"

His tone implied that they were two equals who stepped out for a stroll by the river to begin with, rather than a big brother role-model sent to retrieve a naïve idiot who bolted with a case of nerves. Friends... apart from Toshka, he really never had friends. Wouldn't it be cool to start now?

Volya plucked another pebble, flicked his wrist and tossed it.

Friends, eh? 

And a job. A weird job, but still a job. He'd never held one. Instead he was paid a million sullen stares, implying he was a burden on the society. A burden so heavy, his family refused to shoulder it.

His stone hopped over the rippling water surface three times before making the final splash.

There you go. He could do no worse than Damir. He grasped the offered hand, warm and calloused, and let Damir pull him up to standing. 

"Yeah, friends."