Chapter 11
Katie
The skinwalker’s head swiveled toward the voice.
That was the moment I drove my elbow into the junction of its inverted knee with everything I had left.
The joint buckled sideways. The creature’s weight shifted off me and I rolled hard to the right, scraping bare skin across the rock, putting several feet between us before looking around.
Silas stood at the entrance of the lair. The real Silas.
His dark hair was loose and his jaw was set and his amber eyes were doing the thing they did when he was operating beyond the reach of patience, the gold in them burning flat and steady.
He didn’t look at me. His gaze was fixed on the skinwalker with absolute, undivided attention.
The skinwalker rose from the slope with those horrible, inverted joints unfolding, the skin across its ribs tightening as it drew itself to full height. The arm I’d bitten was dark and oozing.
It turned to face him.
The shift began before it could lunge.
This wasn’t the somewhat slower version I’d seen in the cabin. This was faster, more violent, driven by rage. In the space of a single breath the man was gone and the wolf stood in his place.
The skinwalker lunged.
So did the wolf.
The creature shrieked as the wolf’s weight drove it into the rock, its inverted legs scrabbling for purchase but failing to find any. Then the wolf’s jaws closed on its neck and I turned away.
The shrieking lasted for another moment, then everything went silent.
I sat on the slope, still naked, with the cold mountain air moving over me and my hands shaking from the adrenaline of the last hour. Blood from the gash on my right flank had dried to a dark smear across my hip. The gravel underneath me was thoroughly unpleasant to sit on.
I turned at the sound of paws on rock.
Silas stood a few feet from me in wolf form, breathing hard, blood on his muzzle that was not his. His amber eyes found mine, and he dropped his nose to my shoulder and drew a long breath, then exhaled against my skin.
Alive. You’re alive.
I pressed my forehead against the broad plane of his skull.
We stayed like that for a moment.
“Okay,” I said eventually, into his fur. “I need you to be a person now.”
He pulled back and looked at me, and then he shifted.
The change moved through him and the man knelt on the slope in the cold, naked and blood-streaked and breathing hard.
His eyes moved over me immediately, his gaze taking in my injured side.
“How bad?”
“It’s not too deep.” I looked down at it. “I’m okay.”
His jaw tightened.
“It’s dead?” I asked, mostly because I needed to hear it stated.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure.”
“I tore its head off, Katie.”
I looked over his shoulder at the slope behind him. The skinwalker’s body lay against the rock at the bottom of the incline, a dark, angular heap that was already looking less substantial than it had five minutes ago. As I watched, the outline of it was becoming less definite.
“Is it disappearing?”
“Its body disintegrates when it dies. The elemental essence disperses.” He followed my gaze. “It’s gone.”
I stared at the dissolving shape for another few seconds. My wolf instincts, which I was going to have to figure out how to be on speaking terms with, were quiet for the first time in two weeks.
“I want to burn it,” I said.
Silas looked at me. “It’s not necessary. The body disintegrates—”
“I want to burn the lair.” I turned back to the cave entrance. “All of it. The bones and whatever else is in there. I want to burn the whole thing.”
“Katie.”
“I know it’s not necessary.” I held his gaze steadily. “I want to do it anyway.”
He looked at me for a moment, assessing. Then he nodded.
Silas found what he needed, dry wood and leaves and a rock that might have been flint. The fire was blazing within a few minutes, and I stood outside and watched until I was certain that whatever the skinwalker had left behind was gone. My wolf seemed satisfied as well.
Silas came to stand beside me, naked as he always was after a shift.
“Okay,” I said. “Now what?”
“Follow me.”
He started down the slope, moving with absolute certainty like he was navigating his own land. Which he was, I realized. The Jemez range, or at least this part of it, was clearly his territory.
I picked my way down the path behind him, wincing when loose rock found the bare soles of my feet. He stopped, looked back, and without comment crouched down in front of me.
“Get on.”
“I can walk.”
He looked at my feet and then back at my face, one eyebrow raised. “Get on.”
I climbed on.
His hands settled under my thighs and he stood without any apparent effort, then started walking.
I hooked my chin over his shoulder and watched the mountains move past us as we descended.
The light was shifting, the flat gray of the overcast day thinning toward a pale gold where the clouds had begun to break over the ridge to the west. The smoke from the fire rose in a straight column above us and dispersed.
For a while, neither of us said anything.
“Are you taking me to your lair now?” I asked.
He snorted. “Well, kind of. But my lair is a cabin and it’s much nicer than this.”
“Does it have bones in it?”
“No bones.”
“What about clean blankets?”
“The blankets are fine.” A pause. “I even have an espresso machine.”
“You mentioned that.” I pressed my face into the side of his neck for a moment, feeling the warmth of his skin and the steady pulse beneath it. “Silas. Thank you.”
His grip on my thighs tightened, just slightly. He didn’t say anything. With him, I was beginning to understand, not-saying was its own kind of saying.
* * *
The cabin sat in a clearing near the crown of a long ridge, backed by old-growth ponderosa that closed around it on three sides.
It was not large but not small either, solid, built from timber and local stone with a deep-pitched roof designed for serious snow load and a covered porch that ran the full width of the front.
He set me down on the porch steps and reached past me to push open the door.
“Go inside. Sit down.”
“I’m fine—”
“You have a gash on your side that I haven’t looked at yet, and you’ve been through some serious shit today.” He looked at me with an expression that meant he was right and knew it and was being patient about my resistance to acknowledging that. “Inside, Katie.”
I went inside.
The cabin interior was warm and low-lit.
The main room held a couch with worn leather cushions, a heavy timber table, and bookshelves along the wall.
A kitchen opened to the left, the infamous espresso machine visible on the counter.
The floors were wide-plank pine, smoothed by long use.
The whole place had the same baseline scent I associated with Silas, worked deep into the walls and the furniture from many years of habitation.
It was, objectively, very nice. Better than Dana’s apartment, or my apartment, or anywhere I’d lived before really.
I sat on the couch because my legs had decided they were done for a while.
Silas came in behind me and went directly to a cabinet near the kitchen, returning with a first aid kit, a bowl of warm water, and a cloth.
He studied the gash on my right side, then dipped the cloth and worked along the length of the gash with a thoroughness that stung and a steadiness that did not.
His hands were careful. Not tentative, nothing Silas did was tentative, but careful.
“It’s already closing,” I said.
“I know.” He didn’t stop cleaning it. “Your body heals fast. It’ll be gone in a few days.”
“And the wolf?” I watched his face. “When will that come back?”
He looked up from the wound briefly. “It’ll come when it comes. The bond is settling. Your shift today was triggered by extreme circumstances. When it’s ready, your wolf will surface again.”
He pressed a clean dressing to my side and taped it into place, smoothing down the edges with his thumb. Then he sat back and looked at me, doing a full assessment, head to toe.
“The rest of you.”
“Is fine.”
“Katie.”
“Silas, I promise I am genuinely okay. What I’m not is warm or clean or—” My voice caught on something I hadn’t anticipated and I stopped and looked at the fire.
The quiet that followed held the weight of the last eleven days in it.
The Sandias, and the feeling of being watched from the trees.
Mark in his doorway with his shirt buttoned wrong.
The hospital and the escape and the cabin and Dana’s apartment and the motel and the interrogation room and the cold stone floor of the lair with the skinwalker’s weight pinning me to the ground.
The fire cracked and settled.
Silas stood up. He crossed to the hearth and added a log, then straightened and looked at me. “I know, little one,” he said. “I’ll go and run you a bath.”
He disappeared down the hallway. I heard water running, and the sound of it made something in my chest ease.
I sat on the worn leather couch and let myself doze until Silas reappeared.
The bathroom was at the back of the cabin, small but functional, the walls the same stone as the exterior. The cast iron tub was deep, and he’d filled it with water hot enough that steam rose from the surface. He’d put something in the water too, something clean-smelling and relaxing.
I stood in the doorway and hesitated. He moved to take my arm.
“I can get in by myself,” I said.
“You’re going to let me help you anyway. Unless you’d like your bottom reddened first.”
I blushed, then let him take my arm. He guided me to the tub’s edge and steadied me as I stepped over the rim and lowered myself into the water.
The heat hit me everywhere at once and I relaxed into the tub with a moan.
“Good?” he asked.
“Extremely.”
He sat on the edge of the tub and reached for the cloth hanging on the rail, then moved it through the water and began working it along my arm, from the wrist upward, cleaning the dried blood from the motel room fight and the mountain and wherever else I’d collected it.