Chapter 12 #3
The driver must have been peeing in the woods, because he comes back a couple of minutes later and he drives off and takes me with him.
I know Rex is coming after me, and I know he won’t stop hunting until he finds me, but I think fortune is on my side.
It favors the bold, and everything I have done is bold.
* * *
Fate keeps working for me. The truck pulls in for gas and I hear a helicopter going overhead. Rex’s, I bet. My animal brain doesn’t have a good model for helicopter surveillance, but it does understand being seen from the sky.
It is hard to hold everything at once, but I know when I am hidden and when I am exposed, and right now I am hidden.
But I am also hungry. The energy required to keep this wolf form is much more than to keep a human going. My stomach is growling. I leave the shelter of the truck and I hide away near the gas station.
When night falls, I prowl in the dark, following my nose until I find a big metal bin full of discarded donuts. I eat each and every one of them. They are delicious. Then I slink away from the human smelling place, out into the wilderness.
There is still some human in my head. Not a lot.
Not enough to read, but enough to think.
I was so afraid to be animal, but it is actually a comfort, I discover.
There is so much less to worry about. Once I am fed, all my concerns disappear.
I find a cozy hollow beneath some bushes, curl up, and sleep.
* * *
I wake up freezing. It’s so cold it feels like the cold has made its way past fat and flesh and all the way into my bones. The thoughts are back, dozens upon dozens of them skittering about my brain. I’d forgotten how noisy my head was.
I am not a wolf anymore. I am a naked human woman a few hundred feet away from a highway truck stop and gas station. I know immediately that I have fucked up.
Then everything gets worse.
A warm stream of something borderline unmentionable comes arcing through the frigid morning air. I have to leap out of the bush to avoid being covered in it, giving both myself and the trucker relieving himself a huge fright as we come face to face with each other.
“What the hell?” He stares at me. He’s in his forties, unshaven, hefty and checkered. I wrap my arms around myself and think about running, except I know he might be able to help.
“Do you have a, uh, clothes or something?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Hold on.”
His big rig is parked not far away. He goes back to it, grabs a hooded sweatshirt, and brings it back to me. It smells like beer and god knows what else, but it’s big and warm, it falls to mid-thigh, and it is much better than nothing.
“I got to get back to the city,” I tell him.
He’s not asking a lot of questions, and I’m not telling him a lot of information. He’s got the look of a man who thinks something very fucked up is happening right in front of him, and he is not wrong.
“I’ll give you a ride,” he says.
“Thanks,” I say, trailing after him. My brain feels addled from the shift and from the cold, and from remembering what I just did to Rex. I’m being hunted, I’m not fully mentally online, and the easiest way to get back to somewhere I feel safe is to get into this truck.
So that’s what I do.
“I’ve just got to get to the city,” I tell him.
He sets off without a word, offers me a strip of jerky. I take it gratefully. There are still good people in the world. People who will help others in need.
I’m not entirely sure how far away the city is. I’m kind of turned around. Once I see even a single building of the place, I’ll be able to orient myself.
We’ve been driving for twenty minutes or so in silence, when I realize I haven’t even offered this guy like anything in return for his help. So rude of me!
“If I can get you to drop me off anywhere in the city, give me your details, I can get you some money for helping me,” I say, looking over at him. He doesn’t look back. His eyes are focused on the road, where they should be.
“That’s alright, darling,” he says, pulling over into a private leafy layaway. “I don’t need anything from you other than what you’ve got on you.”
“But I don’t have anything on me,” I say, confused.
“Exactly,” he leers.
He unsnaps his seatbelt, turns and reaches for me, big, pawing hands with filthy fingernails trying to lift up the hem of the hoodie. I draw back.
“Don’t be shy, honey,” he says. “I’m not asking much from you. Just let me do what I want and it’ll be over soon.”
I reach for the door handle. The locks click. He’s operated them from the driver’s side.
“Now you’re not going anywhere, pretty thing, not until I’m done with you,” he says, leering as his eyes turn black. I see something in him I did not see before. Shifters are not the only ones who have predators lurking inside them, beasts which want nothing more than to claim their prey.
I smell him. All of him. I smell his sweat, his filth. I smell something else, too. Death. I smell all the endings he’s brought to women who disappeared without a trace. I smell traces of their presence here, little whiffs of perfume and desperation. There are so many of them. Too many of them.
He lays his hand on me. It is clammy with excitement. It leaves a sticky, needy residue of powdered sugar, sweat, and road filth on my thigh.
It is the last thing he ever does.