8. Big, Bad Wolf
Chapter eight
Big, Bad Wolf
Dex pulled out of Grandmère’s drive at first light. No music. No conversation. The truck rolled over gravel disrupting the quiet.
Tara sat shotgun with her go-bag between her boots.
Behind the seat, Grandmère’s working tools rode in a wooden box she’d packed herself before either of them had finished their first coffee.
Spanish moss hung slack in the cypress. Bayou air came in warm and wet, the way Louisiana liked it before the sun finished climbing.
Grandmère rode in the back. Eyes closed. Tuned to whatever she tuned to.
Tara had slept maybe two hours.
Two of them, because something about this wolf put her on edge and she’d refused to leave a wolf she didn’t trust alone with her grandmother while he worked a finding spell.
Refused was the polite version. Planted her ass at that kitchen table with her arms crossed and her mouth shut was more like it.
Grandmère had let her stay without a word about it.
The wards had given them evidence of Marcus’s location and not the location itself, which Grandmère said meant they needed somebody with broader reach to break through.
So Dex called Bodie. Bodie asked if they were coming up to Magnolia Creek in a tone that closed the conversation. Dex said yeah once, and that was the end of that.
Now they were driving north. Grandmère had said Beaumont like it tasted bad.
Like she'd been carrying the name around for years and was tired of its weight.
Now Tara was riding toward a pack of werewolves with one of their own at the wheel.
The massive male currently had one elbow out the window and that unnerving stillness in his shoulders that she was beginning to recognize as wolf-near-the-surface.
She made herself look out the window.
Lasted four miles.
When she looked back, his eyes were on the rearview mirror. The scar along the line of his jaw caught the early light. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking past her.
“What.”
“Nothing yet.”
“That is not a no, Fontaine.”
He made a sound that almost qualified as a laugh. “No, chère. That’s a ‘I’m paying attention.’”
“What did I tell you about that word?”
“Don’t remember.”
“Bullshit, you don’t.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. Smaller. Slower. The kind of mouth-movement that made her want to slap him and climb him, which she absolutely was not going to think about with her grandmother in the backseat.
Stamina.
The word ping-ponged through her skull the way it had on Grandmère’s porch the first night she’d laid eyes on him. She shoved it back into the corner where it lived and slammed the door.
“Mère,” she said.
Grandmère didn’t open her eyes. “Eyes on the road, baby. The road is where the work is now.”
Tara faced the windshield.
Beside her, Dex flicked the rearview a quarter-inch left.
***
They stopped for gas on the shoulder of a state highway running through pine country Tara hadn’t seen in years.
A typical backroads station that sold pickled eggs out of a jar and ran the same beer cooler it had owned since the eighties.
Two pumps. A canopy that had given up trying to hold its paint.
Dex pulled in and killed the engine. He sat with his hands on the wheel for the length of three breaths.
“Three men,” he said. “Black SUV. Far end of the lot.”
Tara didn’t turn her head. She let her eyes drift past him toward the side mirror, the way Grandmère had taught her to look at something when she didn’t want to seem nosy. SUV at the far end. Parked nose-out. Engine running. Three silhouettes behind the glass.
The driver was looking at her.
She kept her face on the dashboard. “They aren’t gassing up.”
“No.”
“How long have they been there?”
“I suspect only a couple of minutes longer than us. There was a different vehicle behind us this morning, obviously shadowing. They peeled off about an hour later and these picked us up. They passed us about two minutes ago.”
She turned her head and gave him her full face. “Dex. You’ve known we were being tailed all this time?”
“Wasn’t the right time to share.”
“Oh, every single minute back there was the right time to share. You don’t get to decide what I’m allowed to know, you arrogant…”
“Chère.”
“Don’t chère me.”
He looked at her then. Full on. His eyes were more gold than they’d been at Grandmère’s kitchen table the night before.
“Stay in the truck,” he said.
“I don’t care if you’re a big bad fucking wolf. I don’t take orders from anyone.”
His eyes flashed in a way that was entirely inhuman.
“Whatever you say, chère.”
She wanted to set him on fire.
He got out and walked around the front. Opened her door before she could open it herself. His hand found the small of her back from her door to the door of the station, deliberate, warm through the cotton of her shirt. She didn’t push him off. She should have, but she didn’t.
Inside, the AC was working overtime. Dex laid a twenty on the counter and asked the woman behind the register for a fill on pump two, cash, no receipt. The woman didn’t blink. People in this part of the country had been making cash transactions without questions since before any of them were born.
Tara picked up two coffees, some meat pies, and a couple orders of boudin balls.
Through the cooler glass, she watched the SUV.
The driver was on his phone. The front passenger watched the station door while the man in back kept his eyes on the truck.
She set the coffees down beside the twenty.
“They aren’t local,” she said, low, for his ear.
“No.”
“They aren’t wolves.”
“No.”
“What do they want?”
“Eyes on us. They’re not the trigger. Whoever’s holding their leash is the trigger, and whoever that is hasn’t made up their mind yet. I suspect that’s who they’re on the phone with.”
His hand came back to the small of her back as they walked out. He caught her elbow when she went to round the truck on the driver’s side and turned her, gently, toward her own door.
“Man-handle me one more time,” she said quietly, “and we are gonna have a real problem.”
“Mm.”
“You hear me?”
“Heard you the first time. Get in the truck.”
She hissed through her teeth, but got in. His time would come.
He pumped the gas. Got in. Put the truck in gear. Pulled out of the lot slowly, the way a man drives when he doesn’t want anybody behind him thinking he’s in any kind of hurry.
The black SUV didn’t move.
Grandmère from the back, eyes still closed: “We good?”
“For now,” Dex said.
“Define good?” Tara asked, simultaneously.
“Mm.”
***
Half a mile down the road, his body went quiet.
Tara saw it before she understood it. His shoulders. The hands on the wheel. The way his foot came up off the accelerator, like he’d heard something that hadn’t finished registering as a sound.
“Hold on,” he said.
He pressed the brake.
The pedal went all the way to the floor.
Oh, fuck.
Tara’s stomach dropped through the seat.
Dex didn’t curse. Didn’t shout. His hand came down on the e-brake handle in one motion.
The truck shuddered. He shifted down. The engine howled.
He pulled the wheel right, then left, then right, threading a curve that came at them with the speed bleeding out of the truck one fucking degree at a time.
A shoulder appeared on the right.
He took it.
Gravel slid under the tires. The shoulder dropped mildly into a ditch. The truck fishtailed once, came back, and Dex held the wheel like a man holding a wolf by the scruff.
The truck stopped.
Three feet from a culvert that would have taken the front axle clean off.
Nobody spoke for a long beat.
Tara’s hands were flat on the dash. Her pulse was in her ears. Half the steaming coffee in the cup holder had ended up on her wrist, and she hadn’t noticed.
Dex’s hands stayed on the wheel.
His jaw was tight. His eyes were full on gold. Not flecked. Not flashing. Gold.
“Everybody all right back there.”
“All good here.” Grandmère’s voice. “Brakes?”
“Brakes.”
“Hmm…Sigil work. Maybe.”
“Yeah.”
“But when?” Tara turned to him. “How did you know?”
“My foot caught the line going before the pedal reported it. Heard the pressure drop.”
“You heard it?”
“Big bad wolf, chère. Se rappeler?”
He got out.
She got out behind him. He went down on one knee at the front bumper, then flat on his back, then under the chassis.
His boots and the cuff of his jeans were all she could see.
A half-second of silence, then a low word she didn’t catch, and he slid back out, grease across one cheekbone, holding what looked like a length of rubber tubing in his hand.
“Sigil-burn,” he said. “Whoever wrote it on the line knew what they were doing. The cut took its time. It could’ve happened any time in the next twenty miles. They wouldn’t have had to be anywhere near us when it did.”
Grandmère was out of the truck now too, leaning on the hood, eyes open at last.
“Seems sloppy for a Beaumont,” she said.
“They must have followed you.” Tara turned to Dex.
“Do no matter now, baby.” Her grandmother had a point. Tara wanted to scream.
Dex was already on his phone.
“Bodie.”
A pause.
“Roads are watched. Tagged us at the bayou and tracked north. Sigil-burn on the brake line. Nobody’s hurt, but the truck’s dead.”
He listened. His eyes flicked across the hood to her.
“Yeah. Rest stop past the line.”
He ended the call.
He didn’t look at Tara when he said the next thing. He looked at her grandmother.
“Somebody’s bringing us a clean vehicle. Rest stop past the Mississippi line. We limp this one as far as it’ll go and we move on in the new one.”
***
They limped the truck to the rest stop and pulled in past midday.
The new vehicle was already there. Black F-150, parked nose-out at the back of the lot, tucked between the pines and the picnic shelter. A woman leaned against the driver’s side door, arms crossed, one boot kicked flat against the panel.
She watched the dead truck pull in.
Beside Tara, Dex went very still.