Chapter 4 #3
His arm wrapped around me, heavy and warm, his thumb tracing idle circles on my hip.
For a while, neither of us spoke. Light filtered through the boarded windows in thin golden bars, striping the floor and the far wall.
I could feel his come still seeping out of me, warm against my inner thighs, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.
Until the memory of the Chernobyl-coyote forced itself to the surface and informed me that sexy time was over.
“So,” I said, when my vocal cords finally agreed to cooperate. “That creature.”
His thumb paused on my hip, then resumed. “It’s called a skinwalker.”
“What is it?”
“They’re ancient spirits, born from the dark side of the earth’s elemental magic. They can take the form of animals. Twisted versions, usually. But when they encounter humans, they learn to take human form too.”
I thought of Mark standing in his doorway with his shirt buttoned to the collar and his eyes vacant. The perfect assembly of familiar features worn by something that didn’t understand what they were for.
“It killed Mark.”
“Yes. It killed him and took his form. Used it to lure you into the mountains.”
“Why me?”
“Because of what you are.”
I lifted my head to look at him. “And what am I?”
“I’ll get to that.” His jaw tightened, and I saw the tendons in his neck flex in a way that looked involuntary. He almost seemed to be struggling to stay in human form. “The skinwalker has been tracking you. It won’t stop until it has claimed you or it’s dead.”
“Claimed me?”
“To mate.” He said it as if he’d told me before. Which, come to think of it, he had. Right before the magnificent fucking he’d just given me. I’d just decided not to process it at that point.
It was now time to process it.
“Skinwalkers reproduce by—” he continued before stopping abruptly as if in physical pain. A ripple moved through the muscles of his forearm where it rested across my stomach. His body was doing something beneath the surface that his face was working hard to conceal.
“By mating with what?”
“With females like you.” His voice had gone tight, each word costing visible effort. “If it mates with you, you won’t survive. Its offspring would—” Another ripple, this one running up his shoulder and into his neck. His jaw clenched so hard I heard his teeth grind. “Fuck.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ve been in human form too long.” He sat up, and I watched the muscles in his back seize and release over and over. His hands fisted in the sheet. “I’m too far from my territory. I can’t—”
“Wait. You can’t just say its offspring would and then just leave me hanging.”
He turned to look at me over his shoulder. Pain had drawn his features tight, deepening the lines around his eyes, but underneath there was something warm and almost amused.
“I will explain everything. But right now I cannot hold this shape any longer.” He stood, and his body was already starting its terrible rearrangement, the shoulders widening, the spine elongating. “Stay on the bed. Stay in the cabin. I’ll be back.”
“How long?”
“I need to hunt.” His voice was distorting, dropping registers as his throat restructured. “Few hours. Don’t—” His knees buckled and he caught himself on all fours. Fur surged across his forearms. “Don’t leave.”
And then the wolf was standing on the cabin floor, shaking itself.
It stopped and looked back at me with those amber eyes. The same ones that had pinned me to a wall and fucked my brains out.
“You could not have waited ten more seconds?” I demanded.
The wolf blinked unapologetically.
“For the record, its offspring would is the worst unfinished sentence anyone has ever said to me, and I once had a professor who stopped midway through explaining a final exam question because he got a phone call from his divorce lawyer.”
The wolf huffed through its nose.
“And just so we’re clear, therapy for the fact that you just had sex with me and then turned into a dog is going be very expensive. I’m talking years of it. Decades.”
The wolf held my gaze for another moment, then turned and bounded off down the hall.
Where the fuck was he off to? Was there another way in and out? I hadn’t seen one yet.
I thought about getting up and following him, but instead I just sat there on the bed and listened to the cabin settle back into silence.
Right.
So.
I was in a barricaded cabin on the outskirts of Albuquerque with no phone, no ID, no shoes, and the residual physical evidence of the most disorienting sexual experience of my twenty-three years on this earth drying on my thighs.
A man who could rearrange his own skeleton had just told me I was being hunted by an ancient death-spirit that wanted to impregnate me and then turned into a wolf and left.
This was fine. Everything was fine.
I got up and took a shower, my second of the day, because if there was one thing I’d learned during the years I’d spent patiently untangling my orphan-specific brand of anxiety, it was that hot water helps.
There was a clean flannel shirt in the dresser and a pair of men’s sweatpants with a drawstring I could cinch down to my waist. Both were enormous and smelled faintly of pine and something warmer underneath that made my stomach do an unhelpful flip.
I rolled the sweatpants up four times and found a pair of thick wool socks stuffed in the back of the dresser drawer, which explained the mystery from earlier.
He’d put socks on me while I slept.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall and thought about that for longer than was strictly productive.
Then I found my phone.
It was in the nightstand drawer, which meant he must have retrieved it during one of his mysterious hunting expeditions. The battery was dead, but a charger I scavenged after a brief search of the place solved that problem. I plugged it in and waited for it to power on.
A deluge of notifications awaited me, but amid the countless missed calls, voicemails, and texts from my study group, my professors, and a host of other names I recognized, one from a number I didn’t know stood out.
This is Ranger Yazzie. If you get this, please call me. I’ll be happy to listen.
She must have gotten my number from the school or my apartment complex or maybe a friend or neighbor or some government database or other.
Points for putting in the extra effort of texting me on the off chance I ended up with my phone back in my possession, but I hadn’t busted out of the hospital just to call somebody who would inevitably end up dragging me back there.
I could call someone else, though. Maybe my friend Dana, who was in Barcelona for six weeks.
We’d had coffee before she left and she’d pressed her spare key into my hand and said, the plant needs water every ten days and if you want to use the Netflix, the password is PaellaSucks69.
I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me crashing at her place…
or hiding out from mythical creatures there.
Or I could call the same officer who’d interviewed me at the hospital and explain that I’d escaped from said hospital, been carried through a city by a naked man, had sex with him, and oh, by the way, he turned into a wolf. That would go over brilliantly.
I opened my contacts and was scrolling for Dana’s number when I heard a growl.
I looked up.
The wolf was standing in the open door of the bedroom, watching me with those amber eyes locked on the phone in my hand.
“I found it in the nightstand,” I said, in the reasonable tone of a person explaining something perfectly innocent. “It was just sitting there.” I thought you were off hunting, asshole.
The wolf let out a low growl as if he’d heard the last bit along with the rest.
“I’m not calling anyone. I was just checking my messages.”
The growl deepened.
“You can’t growl at me for using my own phone.”
He took one step into the room. The floorboards registered his weight.
I put the phone on the nightstand. “Fine. I’m putting it down. See? Down. Very down.”
The sound stopped. The wolf turned and padded back to its position by the door. It lay down, facing outward, ears rotating like small radar dishes.
I sat on the bed with my arms crossed and tried to think.
The thing was, I didn’t entirely not believe him.
The creature in the ravine had been real.
Mark’s impersonation had been real. The nurse in the hospital room had been real in the same horrifying way that Mark had been real, down to the same charred-sage smell, the same borrowed assembly of human features.
Something was out there. Something that had killed my friend, worn his face, and walked me into those mountains. That much was not up for debate.
But was it hunting me specifically? For the reason he’d described?
If it mates with you, you won’t survive. Its offspring would—
The rest of that sentence must have been bad.
I wanted an explanation, a full one, start to finish, without anyone’s skeleton inconveniently rearranging itself in the middle.
The wolf who just growled at me didn’t look like he was planning to shift into human form and answer questions anytime soon, and I had fifteen percent—now eighteen percent—battery, a phone full of messages from people who thought I was missing or dead, and no real plan.
Stay in the cabin, he’d said.
I looked at the boarded windows. The wolf across the bedroom door, whose ears were now tilted in my direction with the pointed suspicion of a babysitter who had heard the toddler go quiet.
I was supposed to just sit here.
I picked up the phone again.
I’d barely unlocked the screen when the growling resumed. I looked up and the wolf had rotated its head one hundred and eighty degrees without moving the rest of its body, staring at me over its haunches with an expression of absolute inflexibility.