Chapter 6
Katie
The market was two blocks north, exactly where Silas said it would be.
It was a co-op, the kind of place that sold twelve varieties of bulk quinoa and had a bulletin board near the entrance completely papered in flyers for sound bath sessions and lost cats and a woman named Celestine offering past-life regression therapy for forty dollars an hour.
The automatic doors slid open and I walked in with Dana’s reusable bags and a grumbling stomach.
I thought about what to get. Some basics would probably be good: eggs, bread, maybe something green. Coffee, because Silas had mentioned an espresso machine at his cabin and that detail had burrowed into my brain despite everything else competing for space there.
As I pushed the cart down the produce aisle, definitely not reminiscing about the way he’d called me mate as I came for him, I could feel my face flushing as if I were over his knee again.
Avocados. I needed avocados. I checked three of them with my thumb the way Dana had taught me and found two acceptable ones.
You’re a shifter. A she-wolf.
Every hike where I’d smelled rain from fifty miles out. Every person I’d instinctively avoided before I had any reason to. The feeling I’d had in the Sandias, directional and specific, pointing at something in the trees. That hadn’t been anxiety. That had been her. My wolf.
I put the avocados in the cart and moved toward the bread aisle.
The market was quiet at this hour. A woman in yoga pants squeezed past me with a basket full of oat milk.
A man in a fleece considered a wall of nut butters like it was a stock investment.
The lights buzzed steadily overhead, the cooler cases hummed along the back wall, and the whole place smelled of floor wax and fresh basil.
It felt so… ordinary… here. Blessedly, aggressively ordinary.
I stood in front of the bread and thought about how I was going to fit law school into a life that now apparently included demon-beasts with a specific interest in my reproductive capabilities, a wolfman who had fucked and spanked me, and whatever other Dracula Goes to Hawkins, Indiana shit I was going to find out about next week.
The argument I’d been building in Dana’s apartment had been reasonable.
It was still reasonable. I had a life. I was eighteen months from a JD and I had not accumulated that much student debt in order to go live in a mountain cabin and run into trees in wolf form while I learned to use my supernatural depth perception.
I had people. Mark had been one of them, and Mark was dead, which was something I had not yet fully processed because every time I got close to it something else happened that required immediate survival attention, but the grief was there, a heavy weight underneath everything else.
The bread blurred slightly.
I blinked, put a sourdough loaf in the cart, and moved on.
The whole coffee bean section was a wall of glass jars with little placard descriptions that used words like terroir and bright citrus notes, and I stood there reading them without retaining any of it. I grabbed a bag of dark roast at random and put it in the cart.
The dairy aisle was cold. I stood in front of the egg case and let the refrigerated air cool my face and remembered the most disturbing thing he’d told me.
If it mates with you, you won’t survive.
He’d flinched from talking about the creature. He’d held human form despite great physical pain to stay at my bedside, but telling the truth about what was after me had stopped him cold.
I took the eggs and put them in the cart.
The produce section looped back around near the entrance, and I slowed in front of the herb display to avoid having to make any decisions while the argument in my head ran its course.
I should go back. I’d promised I would go back.
I was almost at the register when I passed the rack of free newspapers near the door and my eye caught the headline on the bottom half of the front page.
WOMAN SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING IN ALBUQUERQUE ANIMAL ATTACK DEATH
Below the headline was a photo.
Of me.
The article had my name, a physical description, and a number to call with any information.
I set the paper back down on the rack, face down.
They were looking for me.
Obviously they were looking for me. I’d seen the feds outside my building and understood what that meant. But seeing my face on the front page of a newspaper in a grocery store two blocks from where I was currently staying made the reality of it land in a different, more immediate way.
I was a person of interest in Mark’s death.
Mark, whose killer was an ancient supernatural entity that had been hunting me specifically because I was something I hadn’t known I was until approximately an hour ago.
There was no version of this story that I could tell a detective.
I paid with cash I’d found in Dana’s desk drawer and smiled at the cashier, a teenager with dyed-black hair and a nose ring who looked at me with even more disinterest than I’d hoped.
The bags weren’t heavy. I stood outside in the morning light and held them and thought.
Then I made a decision.
I needed one night. Somewhere quiet, with a door I could lock and no amber eyes tracking my every move. I would eat something and get some sleep and take the time to think all of this through. Then I could go back and Silas and I could have a proper conversation with each other.
I started walking, and not toward Dana’s apartment.
* * *
After forty minutes of walking that took me progressively further from Dana’s neighborhood, I found a motel three blocks east of the transit plaza that seemed suitable enough.
It was called the Turquoise Sands, which was ambitious for the rundown two-story structure in front of me.
The vacancy sign had a letter burned out so it read VACAN Y, and the parking lot featured a pickup truck with a tarp over the cab, a dented compact, and a shopping cart that had clearly been there long enough to develop roots.
Inside the office, a man in his sixties watched a small television mounted high on the wall and did not look at me when I came in, which was fine with me. I paid for a room in cash and he didn’t bat an eye, just handed me a key attached to a rubber fob the color of oxidized copper.
“Checkout’s at eleven,” he said, still watching the television. “Ice machine’s broken. Vending’s down the hall.”
“Great,” I said.
The room was on the first floor, second from the end.
The door had two locks, a deadbolt and a chain, and the carpet was a shade of brown that exists to hide sins.
There was a window AC unit that turned on with a noise like a man shaking a tin can full of bolts.
The bed had a bedspread in a geometric southwestern pattern that was either a design choice or a camouflage strategy.
This was fine. I’d stayed in worse at climbing competitions in the middle of nowhere.
I put the grocery bags on the small table by the window, made myself a sandwich with the supplies I’d bought, and ate sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the wall.
It had a framed print of a roadrunner in a red rock canyon. I stared at it for a while and thought about nothing. Or at least tried to think about nothing.
A wolf has been inside me my whole life.
I took a bite of the sandwich. Outside, somewhere across the parking lot, a car door slammed. Voices carried briefly and then faded. The AC unit rattled.
I was going to turn into a wolf. At some unspecified point, probably soon, my skeleton was going to do the thing I’d watched Silas’s skeleton do on a cabin floor, and then I was going to be stuck as a wolf for some unspecified period of time before I could get back into my own tits.
Finishing my sandwich, I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
I was nearly asleep when I heard something through the wall. A gruff male voice, then an even gruffer response. Something hit the wall, a muffled impact, then silence, then the gruffer voice again, continuous and almost soothing in a way that wasn’t actually soothing.
I put a pillow over my head.
I woke to the light gone orange-gray through the curtains and the sound of voices outside. I lay still and listened. There were male voices, two of them.
“—wrong count, I’m telling you, there should be—”
“Will you shut up, he said after nine—”
“—going to notice when it’s short—”
A door opened and closed somewhere down the walkway and the voices cut off.
I sighed, still staring at the ceiling. There must be some drug deal going on. This wasn’t the classiest of joints, after all. Part of me wondered if I should seek the dealer guy out and buy something to take the edge off of… whatever bullshit this last week had been.
Reaching for my phone on the nightstand, I checked the time and noticed the battery was at twelve percent. I plugged it into the wall with a cable and charger I found in Dana’s bag, the only useful thing I’d thought to grab on my way out, and then laid my head back on the pillow.
As I drifted off, I found myself wondering how long it would be until Silas found me and fucked me into shameful surrender again.
* * *
The knock woke me out of a dead sleep.
I surfaced from slumber all at once. No groggy transition, just one moment I was under and the next I was sitting up in the dark with my heart already running ahead of my thoughts.
I sat still for a moment and listened.
The knock came again, three times, urgent.
I got off the bed and crossed to the door and looked through the peephole.
Silas stood in the orange wash of the parking lot security light. He was dressed the way I’d left him, jeans and flannel, his dark hair loose around his jaw. His hands were in his pockets. He looked perfectly calm, which was somehow more disarming than it should be.
Shit. He was surely pissed.
I leaned my forehead against the door and watched him through the peephole for a long moment. He didn’t knock again. He just stood there with his hands in his pockets and waited.