Chapter Forty-One
The lengthy run that followed was a blur with only snippets of lucidity, because I wasn’t the one in charge.
I vaguely saw us darting through the gaps between buildings like a shadow, unseen even in broad daylight, although not because we were invisible.
But because something buried deep in everyone’s lizard brain suddenly decided to notice other things.
My counterpart paused several times, making me think she must have lost the trail, which wasn’t surprising. I was more surprised that she’d found it to begin with. The hot, dry air and high UV levels in Vegas evaporated scents almost as soon as they were laid, making tracking a nightmare.
You could pick up occasional hints here and there, even of older smells if they’d ended up somewhere protected like a parking garage or shaded alley.
But tracking was possible only if the trail was fresh, really strong, or regularly reinforced.
Otherwise, whatever the sun and wind didn’t get, the low humidity would, causing scent molecules to disperse quickly, and that was in the desert.
The city was worse, with layer upon layer of competing smells, which was probably why she paused at a corner, where a garbage truck had passed hours earlier, shedding enough stench to confuse even the best of noses.
And then again near several eateries with ripe Dumpsters in the back.
The crowds of people also didn’t help, adding a mix of sweat, sunblock, alcohol, and body odor to the hot soup, and that didn’t even account for traffic.
Cars, trucks, and motorcycles coughed up exhaust everywhere, dripped oil, and shed smells from their interiors, which the air conditioning sent blasting out in long streamers behind them.
These crossed and crisscrossed each other constantly, thousands of times an hour, leaving a woven fabric of odor so thick that it felt like the valley was lying under a blanket.
Even a fresh trail was difficult to track under those circumstances, which was why Ulmer and his boys had had such trouble tracking Rand.
And nobody had blamed them, because nobody could have done better.
Except for her. Somehow, my counterpart sorted through a morass of unfamiliar smells to follow a trail more than a week old, and not one of those laid down by the retreating clans to confuse matters. But Bleddyn’s, the one he’d left when fleeing the hotel on the night of the duel.
It was impossible; it was one man, with a scent trail as thin as gossamer even if he’d escaped on foot, which he hadn’t. He’d left in a car. No one could have followed that, not me on my best day, not Cyrus, not a damned Grizzly bear, with a nose seven times more powerful than a bloodhound’s!
And yet, she did. Not in a straight line; the trail was far too degraded for that.
But in fits and starts, using at times single molecules of scent that no one else would have or could have noticed.
Like the oil leak that had made a small puddle underneath the chassis and left faint traces as he peeled out of the lot, the minute scorch marks that remained when his tires bonded to the roadbed whenever he braked hard, and the blood, especially the blood.
The iron-rich particles flaking off the stains that his wounds had smeared all over the interior of the vehicle were heavier than the surrounding atmosphere.
They’d been picked up by his air conditioning, pushed out of the car’s exhaust vents, and quickly floated down to the ground, where some of them landed in cracks in the pavement, in highway underpasses, or in dry ditches along the road, where they were preserved.
And where my counterpart sniffed them out, a task made easier by the fact that some of those particles were ours.
Bleddyn had injured us in the fight, and our blood had splattered, marking him. Ensuring that the molecules he’d been shedding weren’t solely his. And if there was one thing a Were’s nose could track, it was her own blood.
And track it she did. Past blasts of vanilla, citrus, and sea mist erupting from casino HVAC systems, where they acted as olfactory white noise to cover cigarette smoke; through the sharp bite of the heavy cleaning chemicals used nightly to keep the Strip somewhat sanitary; across rotten egg smells from the giant grease traps beneath the big hotels, designed to spare the city’s aging sewer system; and around a fertilizer spill on the highway, the remains days old but still reeking of decaying fish.
All the way out of the city and through the desert, our paws eating up the miles until we abruptly veered off into the wilderness.
And followed the trail to an abandoned SUV with its butt sticking out of an arroyo.
The wreck wasn’t a surprise, as Bleddyn was crap at off-road driving.
The SUV had been all over the place, leaking oil onto an outcropping of rock that must have almost flipped it, careening around a couple of saguaro and scraping the limb off another, and leaving a trail of shattered plastic from a wheel-well liner that hadn’t handled a rock-choked gully well.
And finally, coming to rest in the dried-up water channel serving as a ditch, where we jumped down to examine it.
The front door was open, but the chime was no longer working. The vehicle sat dead and dusty, smeared with the brown of dried blood on the door handle where he had left traces when getting in, and at numerous spots in the interior. But my counterpart wasn’t interested in those.
She was interested in that, a scrap of desiccated, bloody skin caught in the shaded roots of a Joshua tree, where the man had tripped and caught himself as he climbed up the bank.
Or that, the shreds of a tuxedo on the desert above, from the Change he’d made once he realized he no longer had to go on two feet.
Or that, a tuft of fur caught in the splintered branches of a creosote bush.
Yet the path soon became difficult to follow, even for her.
The cool air at night or early in the morning would have made tracking easier, keeping scent particles closer to the ground, where the dew might have reactivated them, and causing an old trail to blaze briefly new again.
But this was high noon, and I didn’t give much for our chances.
And once again, I was wrong.
It took her longer, maybe an hour or more, and she got off the trail several times and had to double back.
But the desert that would have yielded nothing to me told her a story I couldn’t read.
One written in the lightest of touches: a paw print in soft sand, spared from the wind by the side of a boulder, a bit of flattened scrub where a heavy weight had crushed it, a few scattered blood cells clinging to a leaf.
Until she finally stopped, and her hold on me weakened as she stared about in confusion. But not because she’d lost the scent. Because she’d found more than either of us had bargained for.
I surfaced slowly, my thoughts a jumbled mess, as if mine and hers had partially fused on the way here, and separating them was like trying to pull apart strings of different kinds of taffy. But I kept at it, and slowly the reason for her confusion began to register. And it was nothing good.
Magic, a surfeit of it, clogged our nose, slicked our skin, and wrapped around us in a cloyingly, sickly sweet cloud. I almost gagged on it, couldn’t breathe, could barely see, as it was suddenly everywhere. Like drowning in a fog of—
Dark.
The magic was dark.
And as if naming it had released the floodgates, it deluged me, my already shaky body collapsing under the weight of all that—
Evil.
Malicious.
Stolen power, resonating with the lives destroyed to obtain it.
And it felt like it was trying to steal mine, with tendrils wrapping around me, not like a spell, but more like that same fog, curling about my limbs, flooding over my face, sinking into my very pores.
“No!” I screamed at my counterpart. “No! Let go! Let me have control!”
And to my surprise, she did.
She withdrew abruptly, overwhelmed by magic she didn’t understand, but not half as much as I was.
I fought and thrashed against the desert sand, trying to push off an ocean of the stuff.
Which would have been easier if I wasn’t still caught halfway between two minds, to the point that it was like seeing the desert through double vision!
I finally managed to pop my shields and push them outward, shoving the tendrils away.
But I could still feel them, battering against my protection in waves, trying to find a way in.
And shedding an oily miasma that made me want to scream and swipe at my arms and legs, as if to clean them of the stench.
I reinforced my protection, then did it again for good measure, and then just lay there for a second, wide-eyed and panting.
I’d Changed at some point, back to my human form, which was wearing only the tattered remains of the caftan the girls had put on me at Dante’s.
It had somehow survived the mad dash here, probably by hanging up around my ears, where most of it still was.
I jerked it down and then slowly got onto my haunches, staring out at the desert from inside my protection.
And seeing nothing. Only a startled rodent of some kind peering at me out of a bush, scattered rocks, and clumps of dirt that hadn’t seen water in so long they had forgotten what it was, and thought they were rocks, too.
But there was no sign of a threat, and no movement except for the rodent suddenly deciding to make a break for it and scurrying away. No explanation for why both my counterpart and I had suddenly decided to freak the hell out. And still were, because there was something there.