by Faith Hunter
Sometime during the night, I got an official e-mail from PsyLED, but with the noise outside, I missed it. An hour before dawn, the storm broke, Beast slapped me awake, and I found my cell blinking. I rolled up to a sitting position and discovered that I had an official offer from the U.S. government, one worked out with Leo’s lawyers, two congressional committees, approved by the Louisiana governor and vetted by the president himself, all in just under seven hours.
I had a kill order to take down the pack. And I was gonna get paid big bucks. “How cool is that?” I asked my dark, silent room. And best? No one said anything about the lone wolf, who hadn’t been in on the carnage and feasting.
As I sat there, I got a second text from Nadine, the sheriff, with a new sighting location. During the storm the night before, four local fishermen had taken refuge on land in the swamp over near Lake Boudreaux. They had seen two huge dogs and a bear as the storm cleared. Nadine sent both a map and a GPS, saved by the men. I pulled up a sat map and studied it. The sighting had been inland, if you can call the swampy area north of Lake Boudreaux inland, up through an old canal, on actual land.
I studied the site on sat maps and determined that we could get there via boat. I loved modern detecting methods. I got up, stretched hard and slow, and walked to the connecting door.
Banging on the Younger brothers’ door, I shouted, “Wake up, sleepyheads! We got a job with a GPS, to start the day. Big enough bucks to buy the Kid a pony for his birthday!” I started to run away but banged once again, my fist flat on the door. “And I’ll need my special equipment, pronto.” I sent the proposal and the GPS to them and got dressed, glad I’d gotten some sleep. I was gonna need it.
I was packing my boots and other supplies into a bag when my cell chimed. On the screen were the words Darlin’. PsyL authorized me to area. Officially. Flight landing at NOLA at two. See you at 4p.
“Again with the darlin’?” But something like longing or hunger flowed through me and I dropped onto the bed, grinning foolishly into the dark. Rick was coming. Maybe I should have gotten nonconnecting rooms. Not that there would be any actual sex—not with the possibility of me getting the were-taint as a really bad, incurable, untreatable STD—but maybe I should have gotten nonconnecting rooms anyway. Just in case.
I texted back, I may not be me. Fair warning. Rick was a were. He’d figure it out.
Several minutes later he texted to me. Noted. Which made me happy all over for reasons I didn’t understand.
Eli knocked on my door, one tap. That was all. One. Mr. minimalist. “Come.” Who says I can’t do terse?
Eli entered, geared up for the day, a bulge under his arm visible as he entered, another in the back of his shirt, both which were nine-millimeter semiautomatics. I knew he’d have more weapons on—a silver-plated knife or two and a few stakes. All that just to greet the dawn. Eli, a minimalist in all other ways, was not into austerity where weapons were concerned. In his hand was my fetish box. He put it on the bed beside me, and for once was unable to keep his curiosity off his face.
Feeling a little uncertain, because I’d never done this in front of him before, I opened the box and rummaged around inside, finally pulling out a short necklace strung with glass beads and wired with canine teeth and three largish bones. I knew what almost all my necklaces were, animalwise, but some I didn’t use often, and this one I had never used.
Trying to sound offhand, Eli said, “You’re gonna track in animal form?”
My eyes on the bones, I nodded, letting a small smile form. I said, “Think you can find the most recent sighting place?”
“Does a mountain lion scream in the woods?”
I smiled wider without looking at him. “Loud. Even if no one is there. And yeah. Animal form. One with a good nose and who can swim.”
“In gator-infested waters?” He sounded half-teasing, half-appalled.
I chuckled softly. “Most gators are hibernating. Water’s still too cold for them to feed.” I looked up under my eyebrows. “Sarge told me. Anyway, swimming is only important if I really need it.”
“And?” The word was phrased the way he must have spoken in the Rangers, sharp and cutting and demanding of more than just an answer.
“Newfoundland,” I said. “I have the bones of a huge black Newfoundland, two years old, who was in training to work with an SAR team because of her swimming ability and because she had an air nose.”
Eli grunted. “Change in here or the Kid will want to watch. I’ll go get some protein.” He left, closing the door behind him. He hadn’t asked about the air nose comment, because he knew what it meant.
Some dogs track on the ground. Others over water. Yet others—some very special few others—can track through the air, sometimes for miles. They were the wunderkind of tracking dogs as far as I was concerned.
I stripped and put the folded clothes into the bag. It was bright pink with big flowers in hot pink, red, and fuchsia, with green leaves on it. Peonies maybe. The zippered duffel had been a gag gift from the Kid, who expected me to gag and throw it away. Instead I’d brought it on two other jobs. And Eli made him carry it while we both cooed about how cute he looked. Mean? Yeah. Probably. But “turnabout’s fair play” had been fun.
Naked, sitting guru-style, I adjusted the length of my doubled gold chain around my neck. On it was wired a gold nugget from the first place I’d changed after I left Bethel Christian Children’s Home when I was eighteen, and a tooth from the biggest mountain lion I’d ever seen. It was a sort of safety tool, a last-ditch survivor device. If I got killed, and if I had time between my last heartbeat and death, I could change into my Beast form and maybe live. It had saved me a couple of times already, and I went nowhere without it.
I propped a pillow behind me, got comfy on the bed, and dropped into the place of the change. Once upon a time, and not that far in the past, changing into a different shape had been much more difficult. I’d had to calm my heart rate and breathing, meditate, really work at it. Now—maybe because of the times I’d changed in extremis, which could also be called near-death experiences—I could drop into the place of gray energies much faster.
My magic was some active form of quantum mechanics, but I wasn’t smart enough to understand it. I just knew how to use it in the same way I could turn a light on without knowing how electricity worked. I held the fetish necklace in both hands as my breathing evened out; I dropped into the gray place of the change.
I sank deep into the bones and teeth and marrow of the Newfoundland, finding the snake that lives in the heart of all animal cells, the double helix of DNA that skinwalkers knew about and knew how to use long before the human medical research community discovered it.
I let myself flow into the genetic makeup of the dog that died saving its trainer from an attacker, shot before she could ever use the training she was getting to save more lives. My skinwalker energies rose. Pain shocked through me, sharp as a knife blade slicing along my bones. I sucked in a final breath and . . . changed.
* * *
Smells and smells and smells. Snuffled in scents and blew out, dewlaps fluttering. Snorted. Scented in again. I was Beast, but not Beast. Something was wrong. I smelled female human, scent strong and powerful. Layered beneath her, were smells of many other humans. Strong, vital, sick, old, young. Many humans. Much smell of fish. Rain. Female human scent was familiar.
Oh. Jane’s scent.
Jane woke slowly in brain of dog, stunned, as always, by overwhelming power of scents around me/us. I chuffed, Beast’s sound different from New-found-land-dog’s mouth. More . . . doggy. Do not like dogs.
Beast? Jane murmured into the deeps of mind.
Beast is here. Ugly dog. Tilted big dog head. Not as ugly as last dog. Good smells. Good fish smells. Feed us? Am hungry.
Eli said he’d have food, Jane thought back, trying to remember why I/we were in this form. The smells nauseating to her, too strong, disorienting.
As Jane struggled to get her bearings, Bea
st stood on the covers of the bed, stepped to the floor, and went to the doorway, where I/we rose on my/our back legs to make us taller.
What are you—? Stop!
I snuffled with laughter and tapped on door with claws. Ugly black claws, hard and short and not made for hooking prey.
Door opened. Kid smell swept out.
Lunged inside. Knocked Kid down. Stood over him huffing into his face, drooling on his jaw.
“Holy crap. How can you have dog breath?” Head tucked, he rubbed his head on the floor back and forth as if to protect his throat and get away at the same time. Stupid prey move. Should attack instead. Alex-Kid shoved with his hands into our belly, making us oof out a breath. “Ugh. Get off me!” he shouted. Loud in dog-ears.
Stepped to side and chuffed up at Eli. He was leaning against wall, shoulder taking his weight, smelling of laughter, small smile on his face. He looked to us. “Did you sign a no-pets clause on this room?”
Jane took over for us and snorted with laughter. Shook head, like human shakes head. Eli held out a leash. Again Jane shook head. I trotted back to deeps of mind and let Jane take over.
* * *
I wanted to say the ambush wasn’t my fault, it was a big-cat move, but I was laughing too hard. The Kid’s body odor was strong enough to choke a goat—or a Newfoundland—this morning. No more snack foods for him. He stank of the house-made, Cajun-style rémoulade sauce and fried fish and obviously hadn’t showered today. Or last night. Ewwww. And then I smelled eggs cooking.
Eli bent and put a plate of microwaved eggs on the floor beneath my head. Like maybe two dozen eggs. And they must have been delicious because I inhaled them—probably nearly literally because dogs don’t have a great sense of taste to complement their great noses.
While I changed, Eli had been loading up the SUV and we were ready to go. Rather than stay near the Kid, I licked the egg plate clean, trotted out the door and down the stairs to ground level, and leaped into the backseat. From the seat, I jumped over onto the gear in the very back. And we were off.
* * *
The rented airboat was loud. Like really, really loud, when Eli cranked it over. There was no ear protection for dogs as part of the rental, so I’d just have to stand it. The craft was a wide, flat-bottomed johnboat, powered by a gasoline engine and a wooden, aircraft-type propeller in a massive cage. It had two bench-style seats, the back one mounted higher than the front one, with the accelerator and the steering mechanism—a long handle that operated rudders—located up at the backseat.
I leaped onto the front seat and shoved Alex off it, forcing him to sit up behind me with his brother on the backseat. Eli clearly had a massive sinus infection because he was able to ignore Stinky beside him. I let Eli strap me into the seat belt, figuring that a sideways spin might slide me right into the water without it. As we took off from the dock, I stretched out on the seat I had claimed, closed my eyes, let my tongue loll out, and took in the wind. It buffeted my facial hair, flopped my ears back, caressed my face, and filled my nose with goodgoodgood smells, and I was in doggy heaven.
Even Beast seemed okay with this form. Inside me, she rolled over and lay on her side, eyes closed in enjoyment.
Time is different when I’m in animal form. Minutes and hours seldom matter. There is only now, this moment, this set of smells, all finding places in my doggy brain. A scent dog’s brain is wired vastly differently from a human’s brain. It’s like a huge card catalogue, each smell, with its breakdown, root smells, tucked in a different niche or drawer, each interconnected and attuned to memories. But I had no dog memories in this form, so each smell had to find its place. I’d done this before, in bloodhound form, and the experience was totally befuddling, disorienting, and weird. And wonderful.
The other times I’d been in dog form were before I met Eli and Alex, working alone, usually for a single fast bit of reconnoitering. This would be something very different. I’d be working with humans. My humans. Like my brothers, or my family. Possessive, personal, intense. That was the way the dog instincts made it feel. As if the Younger brothers were my humans.
In this form, with them present, I wanted to work. Despite how great I felt as the sun rose around us, heating the air and warming my coat, no matter how great the world smelled, I felt excitement rushing through me at the thought of getting to land and starting a search for big bad uglies.
Maybe this feeling was why humans had begun to domesticate wolves and breed dogs into today’s breeds, because some wolves had wanted to work with humans, had liked the challenge, and because wolves could breed down into something manageable. Maybe. Or maybe humans bred wolves to have something around that fleas liked better than they did humans.
Flea catcher, Beast murmured into my hind brain, chuffing with laughter. Stupid dogs.
There was no awareness or measurement of time, except the sun lifting from the watery horizon, until the stench hit me, I sat up on the seat, my nostrils widening and fluttering. Werewolves. A pong on the air like rotten flesh, wet-dog stink, a reek like nothing else, especially in this form. I stayed upright, taking in the wind, snuffling and shaking my head when the odors of dead fish and dead carrion—turtle, I thought—buzzards, armadillos, rotting vegetation, were too strong. Seeking the were-scent. I could get used to being a dog.
Beast chuffed, her ear tabs lying flat in disproval. Ugly dog, she thought at me.
* * *
The airboat ran up on the ground with a slight lift and change of its center of gravity. I rocked back and forth on the seat, digging in with my claws, and huffed. Without opening my eyes, I took in the site, smelling human males. They had urinated everywhere, used one particular area as a toilet for other functions, another as a fish-cleaning station, pitched tents in the lee of some kind of aromatic tree. They had done a little fishing, a little target practice. I smelled guns and nitrocellulose, beer. Lots of beer. No weres had been here. The wide-bottomed boat shifted again and I barked.
Okay. That felt weird. Sounded weird too. I opened my eyes to see the brothers looking at me. Musta sounded weird to them too. I focused on Eli, who had one foot up in the air, about to get off the boat, and shook my head slowly. He stopped his weight transition, thinking, and put the foot back into the boat. “No one here?” When I didn’t respond he asked, “No were-smell here?”
I huffed again, agreeing with his statement.
“Can you smell them?”
I huffed, broke our gaze, and turned my head. We were on a long, straight canal that ran, unwavering, for several miles through the swamp. The stink of werewolves floated down the wind from that way. Eli returned to his seat, started the rented airboat, and backed us off the flat expanse of muddy land. I kept my gaze in the direction that I wanted us to go.
It wasn’t far. It was actually within visual distance of the drunken fishermen, just as they had said. I stared hard at the small outcropping of land and—despite the seat belt—wagged my tail at the site. Eli, following my visual cues, pulled up to the shore, and beached the boat. Sawgrass grew in bunches here, some taller than my dog form’s shoulder, and stunted, weather-twisted trees, with a number of buzzards sitting in the branches. It was hard to estimate in a dog brain, but Beast whispered to me, More-than-five birds-of-the-dead. Something large dead here. It was jungle, reeking with the overpowering stink of . . . Ahhhh . . . dead alligator and stink of werewolf. Eli released me from the seat belt and I leaped out to the muddy bank, paws sinking into mud. There was no smell of human, just were—
The attack came from my left. It bowled me over, into the mud, and rolled me into the water. Teeth, fangs like razors, came at me from above. Beast ripped me away and slung me to the back of my mind.
* * *
Rolled away from attacker, deeper into canal. Feet found log beneath, not deep. Pushed off. Leaping, rising, slinging self out of water. Screaming with dog roar. Leaping, stretching, leaping, hard, muscles pulling. Seeing two attackers. Werewolves. Sick. Male. Smell of were-taint on ai
r. They lunged. Heard gunshot.
Landed on smaller werewolf. Bowled him over. Saw hairless belly. Sank teeth into ab-do-men. Foul, stinky blood, awful taste in mouth. Ripped into belly. Shook head, tearing flesh free. Heard yelps. Dog-screams. More gunshots. More-than-five. Swung head hard. Tore out chunk of werewolf-flesh. Spat it out. Bad taste.
Wolf scrambled onshore, wolf-claws sinking into mud. Insides of wolf trailing on ground. Prey-enemy-pack-hunter was wounded. Beast is good hunter!
Lunged for wolf.
Was hit in side. Lifted. Batted away by paw. Big paw. Bigger wolf attacking. Was slammed up. Into air. Beast-side rammed into sharpness of airboat. Screamed-yelped. Fell. Wolf killing teeth/fangs sank into Beast neck. Tore into flesh. Smelled/felt hot dog blood. Was yanked to side. Painpainpain. No breath. More gunshots. Too many to count. Bigger wolf staggered. Stumbled. Jaws opened and Beast/New-found-land fell free. Rolled into water.
Beast tried to swim. Could not move. Pain arched across ribs. Sank deep. Water covered head. Painpainpain. Cannot breathe. Looked up. Saw through water. Big wolf had gray coat, hairs with black tips. White underbelly. Black claws and muzzle. Big teeth. Biggest wolf ever. Short back legs. Sloping back. Big. Bigbigbig.
Dire wolf, Jane murmured into brain. Holy crap. A dire werewolf.
Wolf backed away. Carrying injured, smaller wolf, in jaws, like pup.
World began to go black around edges of eyes. Beast—I/we—was damaged. Was wounded. Blood poured into dark brown water, staining it with blood. Death striking deep.
Oh, crap, Jane thought. We’re bleeding. Holy crap. We’re dying. Too late to shift! Again.
Saw Alex dive into water, spindly arms and knobby legs. Water moved in ripples of cold. Felt Kid grab ruff of neck. Darkness fell over Beast.
* * *
“You will not die, damn you.”
Eli voice. Saying words Jane did not like.