Chapter Sixteen – Angela
Chapter Sixteen
Angela
Just follow your nose, felt like really trite advice, the further the truck rattled down the hill.
But I’d never needed to sniff Rabbit out before—and I’d never been so free of silver.
It was exhilarating—I found myself pushing the truck to the edge of its limits, going as fast as it could handle taking the turns, trusting my reaction-time utterly.
I slowed down as I was about to reach the real roads of civilization. If I got pulled over now, I’d be in trouble; I didn’t have any ID and the truck wasn’t mine. I hopped out, feeling the nearness of the moon over head, and breathed the desert air in deep.
Rabbit, baby, where are you?
Suddenly, there was the thinnest sliver of a scent I knew.
Not the wildness behind me, the pine trees and the loam, or the dry dust ahead of me, with the scrub brush clinging on.
But somehow I scented something familiar and known—even though I’d only had minutes with Rabbit after the magician had visited us earlier this night, before we had to say good-bye.
It didn’t matter. His scent was written in my heart.
It smelled like home.
And he was out there, somewhere.
At a forty-five degree angle to the road. The truck couldn’t go off road—but if I drove north eventually I’d find a turn.
I leapt back into the cab and rolled all the windows down.
An hour of driving later, following roads I’d never been on before, my nose pulled me up to some kind of smoldering remains—with three motorcycles parked out front.
The Pack—I turned off my headlights and coasted in in neutral, too late for safety, but I didn’t care about that anymore.
Had Rabbit been inside whatever structure that was?
I parked and jumped out of the cab, running toward the fire, pulling my shirt in front of my face for protection.
It was smoldering like an abandoned bonfire, and the scent of burnt plastic and overheated metal combined into a tang that my shirt couldn’t keep out.
“Rabbit? Rabbit!” I shouted, and then coughed. The bikes still had keys in their ignitions—and clothes set beside them as well, waiting for their owners to return. I shoved the first one over and all three fell like dominos, a thousand pounds of clanging chrome. “Rabbit!”
Nothing answered me. Not a shout—and not a howl.
Had he been inside that? I ran around the edges of it, calling out his name. He’d been here yes—I knew it, even through the scent of flames—but was he dead?
He couldn’t be. I wouldn’t accept that. Not now, not ever. I ran behind the hot heap and scrambled up the boulders behind it to look around, and saw where the earth was slumped, like someone had sucked it down from below with a straw.
Something bad had happened here. But Rabbit hadn’t died…had he?
“Rabbit!” I shouted his name again, into the night. Nothing answered me except for miles of silence all around and the small hissing pops as the structure continued to cave in on itself.
Then a gust of wind blew up from the east, whipping the scents of chaos from my nose and mouth, replacing the heat and destruction with hard dry air and—a strangely familiar wolf.
My boy. My beautiful fur-covered baby. I took in a gulp of it, held my breath, and ran back to the truck.
After that, I was afraid I lost the scent more times than I cared to admit.
It came to me like morse code through the air, on-on-off, off-off-on.
Any time I couldn’t find it, I redoubled, daring to do circles in the road until I found it again to follow.
I was reaching the end of a gas tank—another problem, seeing as I didn’t have a credit card—when I pulled up in front of a non-descript office park.
The trail ended here, I could smell Rabbit—and Jack!
—in the bushes near the entrance. Why, of all places, had Jack brought my boy here?
I tried to look through the windows and couldn’t, because of their tint and because of the glare of dawn.
It was 9 AM and—of course. Since Jack was a vampire, his cultural bullshit was true too—just like I had to be a wolf on a full moon night, he had to sleep during the day.
And if it was safe enough for him, it was safe enough for Rabbit.
I tried the door and found it locked. Then I started knocking.
A large bleary eyed man opened up the door a fraction of an inch. “We’re closed.”
“I need to come in. You have something of mine.”
“There is no possible way that is true,” he said, and moved to close it.
I threw myself against it and we wrestled, each on our own side, both of us surprised by my strength.
I got an elbow in, and as soon as I had the rest of the building for leverage it was over—he stepped back and I sagged forward.
“All right, you’re in,” he said, taking a step back. “What do you want?”
I was in a very posh waiting room, like for a very fancy spa, only most spas didn’t have several hundred pound bouncers—or smell like sex. “My son is here somewhere.”
One of his eyebrows rose high. “Are you, uh, one of them?” he asked, walking back behind the main counter.
“Depends on what you mean.”
I saw his hand dive beneath the counter and realized there was a very real chance I was about to get shot. Then the curtains behind the desk flared open, revealing an oncoming woman in a robe, who’d been caught taking off her make-up. “Hello?” she asked, dramatically.
“I’m a friend of Jack’s.” I could still scent him in here, too, a little sweet, a little musky.
She looked me up and down and then shook her head wearily. “I figured. Come here,” she said, waving me back.
We went through the curtains and down a long hall full of doors.
Nothing about the situation made me feel safer, especially when the scent of sex—a lot of it, from a lot of people—still hung heavy in the air.
So when instead of taking me to Rabbit, we went into a dressing room and she sat down, I stood near the door.
“What’s the meaning of this? Where’s Rabbit? ”
“Your boy’s fine, I promise. But you and I need to have a heart to heart before I let you run off. It’s Angela, isn’t it?”
My eyes narrowed. “Yeah, it is.”
“Well I’m Fran—and Jack’s told me all about you.” She held both her hands up and clawed her fingers, making the international thriller-sign for monster. Jack had…told her. “Don’t look so dismayed. He’s generally trustworthy—and I generally keep secrets.”
And she, whoever she was, had been watching over my son since dawn. I perched on the seat across from her, trying to be polite.
“Thank you,” she said, crossing her hands over one knee. “Now, what the hell is your plan?”
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Your plan. The resolution of all of this mess you’re in.”
I leaned forward in my chair. I would take this entire building apart to get to Rabbit if I had to. “If you know what I am, then you know what I can do—and I don’t owe you anything,” I snarled, letting a hint of my wolf through.
“You may not owe me—but your man’s in a state.”
My head whipped back. “Jack’s not my man.”
She pursed her lips and looked at me, as I felt a flush I couldn’t control rise up.
“All I am saying,” she went on, sounding reasonable, “is that if you’re running away—take your boy and go, and I’ll clean up your mess somehow.
But if you want to fight, Jack’s going to want to be there.
Only he’s not in any condition at the moment. ”
“He…needs blood?”
She winced. “Something like that. So are you staying? Or are you going?”
I’d promised the wolves—and I wanted things done. “Till full moon night, yeah.”
“And you want that foolhardy son-of-a-bitch to fight by your side?” She jerked her chin to wherever Jack was presumably sleeping.
“No!” I wouldn’t let Jack fight my fights. He’d already done enough for me, keeping Rabbit safe from the Pack tonight. But…someone who understood the score needed to bear witness for me, and I couldn’t imagine finishing things without him. “But I do want him there,” I said, more softly.
“All right,” Fran said. “Then I need to explain some strange things about vampires to you.”
I leaned forward to listen.
Rabbit was curled into a ball, sleeping in the corner of a room that looked like a nursery.
I’d sworn not to ask any questions, which after seeing what he was wearing was hard.
But he was so excited to see me, and I him—and I knew that he was fine.
We’d made it through another storm somehow, he and I.
I held him close and buried my face in his hair.
He smelled different, ever since the magician had touched him, but he was still my boy.
“I’m so glad to see you, baby.”
“Momma—you would not believe!” he started, then caught Fran listening in. He cupped his hands to my ear. “Buster’s real, Mom. I’m a werewolf.”
“I know, baby,” I said, holding him tight.
He looked affronted, jaw dropped. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I wanted you to be more grown up first. I didn’t want you to fight your way out of things.” I swallowed, and went for the full confession. “I’m one too.”
His eyes went wide. “What about the bad people? Last night—” he began.
I hugged him until he stopped talking. “I want to hear your story, from the beginning to the end—but we need to get out of here, first.”
“Okay,” he said, and for once in his little boy life, didn’t squirm to get free. He just quietly held me back.
I could’ve stayed there with him for hours, ignoring the creepy scenery, but—I looked back to Fran. “I don’t have any money. And I’m almost out of gas.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll just add it to Jack’s tab.” I had no idea what that meant, and I didn’t want to—her smile was almost predatory.
I installed Rabbit in the truck, locked the doors, and walked back inside. Fran led me down a hallway and brought out a key that opened up a padlock as big as my palm.
“He’s all yours,” she said, sweeping the door open. A motion sensitive light turned on, and I saw Jack for the first time since leaving Mark’s. He hardly looked like the same man.
I gasped. “Oh my God.”
“Yeah. I’ve seen him dead before, but this is a little rough, even for him.
He’s totally safe right now, by the way,” she said, wandering off to get something.
I crept into the room. I smelled dirt, hell I saw it everywhere, poor Jack was covered in it, and his ribs were bent wrong, and some of his nails were missing.
His boots were off, and one ankle was completely raw to where I thought I could see bone.
“He’s a tough motherfucker though. Don’t let this fool you,” Fran said, coming back in the room.
She was holding a bolt of fabric. “Blackout curtains. Vegas’s finest. I invest heavily.
” She thumped it on the ground beside him with a heave, and started stretching a fold out, while I stood, arms crossed, taking his wreckage in.
She stopped and looked up at me. “I could use some help.”
“Of course.” I knelt down and stroked dirt out of his hair. Out of all the bosses he could’ve ever had—how on earth had he found me?
Fran cleared her throat. I flushed, and helped her roll him.
Rabbit and I drove to a run-down Target, a grocery store, and then to a sad hotel on the outside of town with its back to the desert.
Jack was wrapped up in the truck’s bed, with a zip tie on either end, and it made me nervous every time we left him that someone would want to get a closer look.
Our luck held though, and no one was around to ask any questions when I slung him over my shoulder and took him inside the hotel, shoving him beneath the bed furthest away from the window.
I got Rabbit in and out of a shower, took one myself, and then we both pulled on new outfits that smelled like the store, pulling the tags off with our teeth.
It turned out there wasn’t much Rabbit could tell me, in between the PB&J’s that I made him.
He remembered a system of tunnels and some scary monster frightening him, meeting some vampires—a lady vampire who sounded suspiciously familiar, and I found my hand clenching tighter around my plastic knife—and then motorcycles coming.
To think we’d still been sold out after all Mark’s hard work—but Rabbit had been saved, due to Jack’s equally quick thinking.
Jack had practically thrown him out the door and shouted for him to run, so he did, for the boulders and then—he remembered nothing.
Not until he’d turned back into a boy outside the bushes at Fran’s this morning.
We lay together, snuggled tight after our makeshift meal. “So what happened to you, Mommy?”
I stared at the generic art hung high on one wall—probably to cover some prior guest’s punch-hole. I could hear another couple fighting three doors down. “It’s a long story. I met up with some werewolves, and then….”
“You got away? Was there fighting?”
“Yes and no. I got away. But—I made a promise that we’d go back.”
“Back to them? But didn’t they kill Grandma?” His little body tensed, and he growled. “We’re going to kill the ones that killed grandma, aren’t we.”
“I don’t know, baby. But we’re going to try.
It’s the only way to get free.” I’d bought a copy of the paper at the grocery store—Gray’s escape had made the front page.
Reading the headline had made the pit of my stomach drop like I’d taken another shot of silver.
But it was all the more reason that we had to end this, somehow, someway.
“Momma can I watch cartoons?” Rabbit asked, as I stroked his hair away from his face.
“Sure, baby,” I said, and handed the remote to him.