Chapter 7
Katie
The silence on the line lasted long enough that I started to wonder if Ranger Yazzie had hung up on me. I wouldn’t have blamed her, really.
“Where are you right now?” Yazzie’s voice had dropped.
“I’m in the parking lot of a motel called the Turquoise Sands on the east side of Santa Fe.”
“Do you know where it went?”
“No. It jumped through the window and escaped into the brush. There’s a blood trail, but it’s too dark to see where it leads.”
There was another pause. I heard her breathing, measured and controlled, and then what sounded like a door closing on her end. When she came back on she was quieter. “Tell me what happened.”
So I told her. The knock at the door, the charred sage smell, the creature and my battle with it. She listened without interrupting, which was more than I’d allowed myself to hope already.
When I finished, she exhaled. “You hit it with a chair.”
“It was a really heavy chair.”
“And it jumped out the window?” I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like she was impressed.
“Yeah.”
“And it looked like the man who brought you to the hospital?”
“Like it was wearing his face, yeah. Until I injured it. Then it switched to its messed-up-coyote form.”
“That’s consistent with the stories,” Yazzie said softly, almost to herself.
My heart picked up pace. “You’ve heard this described before?”
“Miss Gregory—”
“You can call me Katie.”
“Katie, we can talk about this later. For now, I want you somewhere safe.” She paused, obviously thinking.
“I have a friend. He’s in private security, ex-military, and he happens to owe me a particularly huge favor.
He has access to a property in your area he uses for client relocations.
It’s secure, it’s clean, and it doesn’t have your name on any paperwork.
” There was another pause. “Can you get to the corner of Guadalupe and Cordova?”
“I’m on foot, but yeah. Give me twenty minutes.”
“I’ll call ahead. There’ll be a key in the lockbox by the gate. Code is four-seven-two-one. I’m two hours out.” She stopped. “And Katie. Don’t call anyone else.”
“Understood,” I said.
* * *
The property was a small adobe compound set back from the road behind a stucco wall with a low wrought-iron gate.
The lockbox was exactly where Yazzie had indicated.
The key inside it opened the side door, which brought me into a clean, sparsely furnished two-room space that smelled of dust and cedar and disuse.
There was a couch, a bed in the back room, a bathroom with a functioning shower, and a kitchen with the basics in the cabinet.
I noticed the deadbolt on the front door and one on the side.
The windows were narrow and sat high on the walls.
I put my luggage/grocery bags on the kitchen counter, then sat down on the couch and stared at the floor for a while before finally gathering the energy to get up, find a first aid kit under the bathroom sink, and unwrap my forearm.
The scratches were the kind that look worse than they are, long and dramatic, but the bleeding had stopped and the edges were already doing the thing my wounds always did, pulling together faster than they should.
I cleaned them with the antiseptic I found in the kit, which hurt like fuck, then taped gauze over them and sat on the edge of the tub until my eyes stopped watering.
By the time I heard the gate, I’d eaten crackers standing over the counter and changed the gauze once and done a thorough, unproductive review of every possible terrible fate I might face.
The knock at the side door was three short raps.
“It’s Yazzie.”
I let her in.
She looked different out of uniform, wearing dark jeans and a canvas jacket.
Her hair was in a low knot at the back of her neck.
She carried a canvas bag over one shoulder and a paper bag from somewhere that smelled like green chili and chicken.
She stepped inside and did a quick visual circuit of the room, then looked at me directly.
“You look better than I expected,” she said, “considering the shit you’ve been through.”
“Thanks.”
I pulled the door closed behind her and she set the food on the counter and unzipped the canvas bag, extracting a proper first aid kit, a pair of latex gloves, and a bottle that looked like it held something medical if not pharmaceutical.
Pulling out a chair from the small table by the window, she gestured at it and I sat. She sat across from me, extending her hand for my arm without asking, and I gave it to her.
“These are pretty deep scratches,” she said, unwrapping my gauze and examining them under the pendant light above the table before glancing back up. “They’re already closing.”
“I heal fast.”
She didn’t look surprised, just gave a little nod. “Yes. I’d imagine you do.”
She cleaned the wounds again with something from the unlabeled bottle that smelled herbal but still managed to sting just as bad as what I’d used. “The man who brought you to the hospital,” she said, wrapping fresh gauze around my arm. “He’s a shifter.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.” I watched her face. “You know about them?”
“I know a number of things that don’t get written in official reports.
” She secured the gauze with medical tape, smoothed it down, and sat back.
Her dark eyes were direct and calm. “I knew at the hospital that you were telling the truth. Not because your story was coherent. It wasn’t, not to Cole, not officially.
But I’ve been in this region my entire career, and I’ve been hearing versions of what you described the whole time.
Tourists who came back from the Jemez or the Sandias talking about things that didn’t belong to any species in the field guides.
Hikers who said they were followed by something that changed shape.
” She folded the packaging from the gauze with neat movements.
“Every single report got filed in the category of misidentification or psychological distress, because that’s the only category where we could make them fit. ”
“But you kept the sketch.”
“I kept the sketch.” She held my gaze. “Because I recognized it.”
The pendant light hummed. Somewhere down the block, a dog barked.
“Tell me what you know,” I said.
She was quiet for a moment, looking at the table between us. Then she got up and opened the paper bag, set the food out between us, and sat back down.
“Eat something first. You’re pale.”
The green chili was from somewhere good, the real kind with enough heat to require a moment of respectful acknowledgment after the first bite. I ate as she talked.
“My grandmother’s people called them yee naaldlooshii, which means ‘sometimes it goes on all fours’ in English, but these days people who still remember them call them something else.”
“What?”
“Skinwalkers.”
Silas had called them the same thing.
“Most of the legends describe them as humans, wielders of dark, elemental magic who were corrupted by it.” She watched me over the rim of her glass. “But that’s not true. What’s been following you was never human. Its kind walked the Earth long before ours did.”
“Silas… the shifter, told me they’re elemental spirits. Born from the dark side of the earth’s magic, or something like that.”
“Yes.” She set the glass down. “And they don’t choose targets at random. If one has been following you, then at some point it caught your scent and decided you were worth the effort.”
“Silas said it wants to mate with me.” I paused. “Because of… what I am.”
“A she-wolf, you mean.” She said it matter-of-factly, with no hint of surprise.
“How do you know about shifters?”
“My grandmother had stories about wolves who walked as men, sometimes even living among us, but I’m reasonably confident this is the first time I’ve been in the same room with one.”
I looked at my wrapped forearm on the table. “I found out a couple of days ago.”
“How are you doing with that?”
“Excellently,” I said. “Handling it beautifully. No notes.”
The corner of her mouth moved. It wasn’t quite a smile but it was adjacent to one.
“What does it do?” I asked. “When it mates with someone. What actually happens?”
Her expression settled back into the careful register.
She looked at the food between us, then at me.
“My grandmother told me the offspring kill the mother as they’re birthed and the skinwalker’s spirit passes into the litter.
Then the creature dissolves into dust, though I doubt that’s of much comfort to its chosen mate. ”
“It’s a little comforting,” I admitted. “I mean, at least it’s not personal I guess…”
“Oh, it is very personal,” she said. “They follow a scent for weeks before they act, and they fixate completely on a target. As long as it’s alive, it’s coming for you. Not anyone else. You.”
“Will I be safe here?” I asked.
She held my gaze and didn’t look away. “Not indefinitely, no.” She was quiet for a moment.
“But it’s injured. It’ll need time before it’s mobile enough to start hunting you again.
” She glanced at the narrow, high windows.
“And this property has some advantages. My friend’s clients occasionally require discretion from things more conventional than what’s after you. ”
“Meaning what… there are some weapons hidden here or something?”
“Meaning someone thought carefully about what makes a building hard to find and harder to enter.” She began clearing the food. “It’s the best I can offer right now. Your other option is turning yourself in to the FBI, who of course want to ask you about quite a few things by now.”
“Thus my face on the front page of the newspaper.”
“Yeah.” She said it like she was unsure what else to say.
“Thank you,” I said. “For at least not treating me like I was brain-damaged.”
“I saw it in your eyes at the hospital.” She zipped the canvas bag and stood. “People who are confabulating have a specific quality when they talk. They’re searching for the story while they tell it. You weren’t searching. You were reporting.”
She carried the bag to the door, then stopped and turned back.
“The shifter.” She measured her next words. “He’s going to find you himself before long.”
“I know.”
“Do you trust him?”
I thought about his amber eyes watching over me, his strong hands throwing me over his shoulder, his magnificent cock…
“Yes,” I said. “I know I probably shouldn’t, but yes.”
She nodded once, seeming satisfied with that. “Get some sleep. I’ll be back tomorrow morning.” Then she left. The gate clicked behind her in the quiet.
I sat at the table for a while longer and listened to the sounds of the city, then went to the back room, lay down on the bed with my shoes still on, and pulled the blanket up to my chin.
The wolf inside me, whatever she was and wherever she lived in there, had gone quiet. Like it had been running hard for days and had finally been given permission to rest.
I fell asleep with the light still on in the kitchen.