Chapter 4 #4
“Look,” I told it. “I have handled my own life for twenty-three years. I have paid my own rent since I was eighteen and maintained a three-point-eight GPA through two years of law school, and I do not need to be managed by a lesser mammal.”
The lesser mammal stared at me.
“I’m going to look up one thing. One informational thing. I’m not calling anyone.”
He bounded over and nudged the phone out of my hand with his nose. It fell to the floor with a thunk, and he stepped on it. Not hard enough to break it, just enough to assert claim to it.
“That’s mine,” I insisted in my best You and Your Pup, How to Set Boundaries voice.
I took a breath and stared at the wolf.
The wolf stared back at me. His paw didn’t move.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll just sit here and stare at the wall then. That’s a great use of my time.”
It was time for a new approach. It was time to be sad.
After several minutes of over-the-top sad girl eyes, the wolf seemed to relent. With a skeptical snort, he removed his paw from my phone and allowed me to pick it up from the floor.
I typed skinwalker into the browser, the wolf giving me a healthy dose of side-eye as I did so. The results were not reassuring. Articles about Navajo legends of malevolent supernatural beings that could take the form of animals or humans, just as the wolfman had told me.
I was so absorbed in my doomscrolling that I didn’t notice movement until a large cold nose pressed firmly against the back of my hand.
I yelped. The phone hit the mattress.
The wolf looked at me without apology. Apparently he felt he’d given me plenty of time.
I didn’t expect the sad girl eyes to work again, but I tried them anyway. They didn’t.
He left around what I estimated was mid-morning, presumably going off “hunting” again, whatever that meant. He probably had a whole harem of girls he routinely scared the fuck out of before being like “Sorry, have to be a wolf now, byyeeee!!”
I counted to sixty.
Then I got up and tried pulling off the boards barring the cabin door.
They were on too fucking tight, though, so I decided it was time to figure out how this asshole was getting in and out of here.
I found the storm cellar five minutes later and was out his little Hardy Boys Adventures trapdoor with my phone in hand two minutes after that.
The day was clear and cool, with that flat, bright quality of a New Mexico morning before the heat had built. The trees around the property smelled clean and skinwalker-free. I stood in the dirt lot and breathed it in, letting it steady me.
Walking away from the cabin, I had a frank internal conversation with myself.
The rational argument for returning to the cabin: there was genuinely something out there that had killed Mark, and I had personally been hunted by it thrice now.
The wolfman (manwolf?) had been protecting me, at significant physical cost, for over a week.
He had carried me away from a threat. He had been correct so far about everything I’d been able to verify.
The (less) rational argument against staying in the cabin: I was a grown-ass adult woman who had been fucked by a smoking hot werewolf, but that didn’t mean he had any business leaving me sitting in a boarded-up cabin and expecting me to stay there just because some grandma-eating motherfucker told me to.
Also he’d knocked my phone on the floor.
I caught a city bus several blocks from the property, paid the fare with coins I found in the sweatpants pocket, and sat in the back, thinking.
I couldn’t just waltz up to my apartment. That much was obvious. Even operating under the least X-Files possible interpretation of the last week’s events, there was a dead man whose killer hadn’t been found and I’d just broken out of a hospital like a crazy person.
The bus route swung south, then east, and I rode it while I thought.
The city moved past the windows, ordinary and sunbaked.
A man got on at Central with a grocery bag.
A woman with two children sat three rows ahead of me.
Everything was so relentlessly, peacefully mundane that the events of the past week seemed like a dream generated by someone else’s subconscious.
But it wasn’t a dream. I was alive, awake, and not on drugs, and I was wearing a man’s sweatpants because he’d turned into a wolf and then run off.
I opened my phone and pulled up the map.
My apartment was in the north part of downtown, a cluster of adobe complexes with courtyard parking and the perpetual smell of green chili from the restaurant across the street.
I could approach from the park to the south and see the building without going within two blocks of it.
If nothing seemed wrong, I could retrieve some clothes and my backup debit card and figure out a next step that didn’t involve waiting for a wolf to come home and finish his fucking sentence.
That plan lasted until I saw the three black SUVs, two marked police cruisers, and a van with federal plates in the parking lot of my complex.
Two people in FBI windbreakers were visible near the front entrance, and there was a folding table set up under the portico with what looked like a command center set up around it.
As I watched from behind a cottonwood, a uniformed officer emerged from the building’s front entrance and walked directly toward a man in a dark blazer, gesturing at a tablet he was carrying.
The feds really were looking for me. I allowed myself a moment to feel like a badass.
Then I stood behind the tree for a solid minute or two and seriously considered turning myself in.
I had nothing to hide. I hadn’t done anything illegal.
They would assume I had panicked due to the aftereffects of the head injury and fled.
I could work with that. I wouldn’t even have to mention being manwolfed good and hard.
Except…
Except I didn’t know if I could trust them.
I hadn’t known if I could trust the hospital staff, and that instinct had been correct.
I didn’t know if the thing could impersonate someone in a federal windbreaker as easily as it had impersonated a night-shift nurse, but I couldn’t see an obvious reason why not.
I didn’t know anything about it, really, and standing in the park behind a tree in borrowed sweatpants was not going to improve my information situation.
I turned toward the alley that ran along the east side of the park.
That was when I smelled it.
Not the charred sage, not exactly. It was similar but weaker, like a scent that had been in a space and then left it rather than one that was actively present.
At the mouth of the alley, a man sat against the brick wall with his legs stretched out across the sidewalk.
He was dressed in layers, a dirty canvas jacket, knit cap pulled down over his ears despite the warmth of the morning.
A cardboard sign I couldn’t quite read. His chin was down, like he was asleep or close to it.
I almost kept walking. Then he moved a little, and I got a clearer hit of the smell, and every hair on my arms stood up.
The sensation building in my stomach was unmistakable. It had announced Mark in the hallway, it had announced the nurse in the dark. It surged up from beneath conscious thought, insistent and primal, the same ancient instinct that had kept me alive this long and wasn’t done yet.
Run.
I ran.
Not back toward the park, not toward the FBI. Down the block, east, then north on Guadalupe, until I hit the transit plaza and saw a northbound bus pulling up to the stop. If I wanted to head for Dana’s place, which felt like the best option at this point, this would be the bus to take.
I got on.
Dana’s apartment was a second-floor unit in a building that had been a warehouse at some point in the mid-century.
It was dim and cool and had the faint must of an enclosed space that hadn’t had a window opened since Dana’s departure.
Climbing shoes hung from a hook by the door, a library book lay spine-up on the couch, and a sticky note on the fridge had her contact information in Barcelona scrawled on it.
I threw away the ancient pad thai in the fridge and drank a glass of water, then sat down and put my head in my hands. I was currently in my friend’s apartment, wearing a stranger’s sweatpants, with no clear plan beyond don’t go home and don’t get eaten.
I needed to eat something myself. Dana’s pantry produced peanut butter, crackers that weren’t quite expired, and a can of black beans I chose not to think too hard about. I ate standing over the kitchen counter and watched the street below the window and thought.
He’d said stay in the cabin. He’d said I’ll explain everything.
I hadn’t stayed, which was, objectively, exactly what he had coming. Still, I felt almost… naughty. Like I should have done as I was told by my mate.
My mate? Was that agreed upon now?
The more pressing issue was the hobo-outfitted skinwalker back in the alley. Because if the skinwalker was real and the wolfman was right about that, he was probably right about the rest.
Which meant its offspring would was a sentence I really needed to hear the end of.
I took a shower, found a pair of Dana’s leggings that fit well enough and a vintage Lobo’s sweatshirt that was only slightly too large, then claimed the bed because the couch had a spring I could feel from across the room. I lay on my back in the dark and stared at the ceiling.
The amber eyes came back immediately. His voice came back too, rough and certain.
You’re mine. Say it.
And I had said it, repeatedly, pressed against the rough planks of his cabin with his hands gripping my hips, his cock buried in my spasming pussy, and his palm smacking my bare ass.
I squirmed on the mattress as I thought about the way he’d pinned me to the wall.
Gentle is what you deserve. But it’s not what you need.
My hand drifted south.
I pressed it flat against my stomach for a moment and told myself that touching myself while thinking about a man who had spanked me and then turned into a wolf was a line I shouldn’t cross if I wanted to maintain any remaining claim to having my priorities in order.
Then I thought about the way he’d said naughty girl, with that low growl, and my hand kept moving.
I kept it quiet. Dana’s walls were thin. I let the memory play without trying to direct it, the weight of him against my back, the sting of his palm, the way he’d made me beg for it, and by the time I reached the edge the sheet was bunched in my fist and I’d bitten my lip hard enough to hurt.
The orgasm was good. Embarrassingly good given the circumstances.
I lay there afterwards with the ceiling fan turning slowly overhead until my mind circled back to the look he’d given me before he left.
Not before he shifted, before that, when he’d still been human and lying beside me and his thumb had been doing that maddening idle circle on my hip.
There had been something in his eyes besides lust. It was deeper, more primal and possessive.
Like I belonged to him, and maybe I always had.
I fell asleep thinking about that.