by Faith Hunter
Eli rearranged weapons and Jane-gear. “Brute, get over here.” Wolf growled, knowing what Eli wanted. “You’ll carry him or I’ll shoot you myself,” Eli said. Not mad. Not angry. Speaking truth. Brute walked to Rick, growling.
Making grunting sound, Eli lifted Rick and laid him on Brute back. With more stinky stuff, tied Rick to Brute. I chuffed with laughter. Went to Rick. Smelled wound. It stank. Stank of were-taint.
Pea mewled in ear. Not death sound. But sound like Rick was sick again. Sick with wolf. Beast swiveled head to see Pea. Thinking. Thinking like Jane. Was hard. Pea should have chased werewolves when they ran. Was Pea’s job. But Pea stayed with Rick. Knew Rick was sick. Knew Eli and Jane and Beast would kill wolves. Beast walked upwind. Sniffing. No werewolf scent ahead. But they might circle in back. Hunters. Pack hunters. Sneaky pack hunters. But big wolf was full of silver. Could not change back to human form with silver inside. Would have to get female wolf to cut out silver bullets. Did not know what werewolves would do, attack or run away and try to heal.
“Okay. Let’s go,” Eli said to Beast. Beast turned and faced water and scrub and bushes. Walked into dark. “So what? You taking our six?”
Beast chuffed with agreement.
“Good by me.”
* * *
Trip back to boat was long. Beast was hungry. Was muddy, dirty. Do not like mud. Do not like mud at all. Belly aches with hunger. Body is weak. Want to eat. Want to eat deer and cow and rabbit. Looked at Eli. Looked at Brute. Would even eat Brute.
Eli untied Rick from Brute back while Beast stood watching trees and scrub. Did not smell wolves. Eli lifted Rick to lay on long seat of airboat. Was noisy—feet on hollow boat bottom. Rick groaned. Was sick. Retching.
Brute jumped into canal and swam. Blood and mud washed away.
“You too, Jane,” Eli said. “Make it quick.”
Beast snarled. Am not Jane. Am Beast. But stepped into water. Swam out from shore and back. Looked for spirit being of rainbow colors but did not see it. Followed Brute from water. Brute shook, pelt showering water and mud all over Beast. Chuffed with laughter.
Beast snarled. Leaped on Brute. Sank in claws. Bit hard on nose. Holding. Brute yelped/whined. Quivered. Did not know what to do. Froze like prey.
Beast let go and walked back to water. Washed again. Shook water from pelt. Climbed into airboat and sat beside mate. Kept back to wolf, but eyes turned to see. In wolf pack, Beast would be alpha. Wolf would be beta. Saw him lick his snout. Could smell his blood on air.
* * *
Was near dawn when we got to hotel. Jane was awake, watching through Beast eyes. Eli carried mate up stairs to room. Wolf and Beast followed. Eli turned on shower in Rick room, washed Rick. Cut off his clothes. Opened wound and saw healing. Carried Rick to bed and laid him, naked, on bed.
Beast went to mate and sniffed. Rick was sick. Sick with were-taint. Pea jumped from Beast back to bed with Rick and curled up in space at shoulder, neck, ear. “Is he gonna turn wolf?” Eli asked. Jane was shocked at question. Felt her pull away. Fear action.
Pea made sound, “Uuuuu,” and shook head.
“Is he gonna die?”
Pea made same sound and shook head again.
“So he’s just gonna be sick as a dog and then get better?”
Pea made “Sssss,” sound and nodded head.
Jane made choking laughter sound deep inside Beast.
“Janie? You want to wait till dark to go after the wolves?”
Beast nodded head. Padded from room and went to door of Jane room. Eli opened door and Beast went inside. The Kid rushed out of room talking too much, too loud. Was prey action when werewolves were hunting. Stupid human. Beast pawed door shut and lay down on floor. Entered gray place of change.
* * *
“Oh, crap. That hurt.” It still hurt. And I had a wide, white scar, to show me how close I’d come to dying. I made it to the shower, turned the water on hot, and rested against the wall as the water beat against me. I was starving. I could tell from the way my ribs stuck out that I’d lost at least ten pounds, shifting twice with no caloric intake. I needed food and a lot of it if I was going on a hunt. Beast? You there?
Beast is here.
What happened?
Beast showed me. Showed me everything. When I saw Rick fall, I ached inside. When I saw the spirit being, the thing like Rick’s Soul, I was taken off guard. But there wasn’t time to whine or grieve or worry. Dawn had broken. We needed food, guns, planning, and we needed to get back in the swamp. I half crawled from the shower and dried off, using the blow drier on my hair. Tossed my wet, muddy, bloody clothes into the shower and washed them off, wrung them out, and left them hanging over the shower door. I fell on the bed and closed my eyes, desperately needing rest, maybe even more than I needed food.
After my forty winks, I dressed in clean clothes and weaponed up, the leathers wet and slick even after I dried them with a towel. They needed oiling and a lot of attention, but they weren’t going to get that until the wolves were dead.
I knocked on the connecting room door. Eli opened it and stood aside to let me enter. He had showered with scentless soap and dressed in clean clothes, not wearing the smelly stuff his girlfriend gave him. Brute was on the floor near his bed. Eating. Before I could accuse him of feeding the wolf before he fed me, Eli shoved a fork and a plate of microwaved scrambled eggs at me. I sank to the floor and shoveled the eggs in. Before I was done, he dropped four pancakes on my eggy plate and drenched them with syrup. Then more eggs. And then he handed me a twenty-ounce protein shake that tasted like chalk and artificial blueberries, but I downed it too.
Then he handed me my M4 harness and helped me strap it on. All without a word spoken. When I was weaponed up, and he had checked the readiness of my slimy-wet, leather gear, he said, “I called the death in to Rick’s partner. They’ll handle the crime scene, rather than calling in the state boys, since we fu—messed it up so bad. I heard the call go out forty minutes ago.” I nodded and he pointed at me. “You, the wolf, and me. Back on the water. Now. We need to hit them while the big wolf is weak, while the female is still cutting rounds out of his body and he’s injured and stuck in wolf form. Our best bet is the crime scene, since they can’t get off the water while wounded and without their boat. Okay?”
I nodded. And accepted the bag of candy bars, energy bars, prepackaged high-protein energy drinks, and chips packed by the Kid. On top was a sugary, icing-coated, cream-stuffed snack cake. It looked totally bad for me and totally delicious. It had to come from his secret stash, the one he hid from his brother, the health food nut. I took it with a smile and he shrugged. “Enjoy. Be safe. And keep him safe.” He thumbed at Eli. “He’s hard enough to live with now, without adding raw meat to his diet and him howling at the moon three nights a month.”
Eli ruffled his brother’s hair as if he were a child and loped down the stairs, Brute on his heels. I followed more slowly, not because I felt bad, but because my stomach was so full I could hardly move. And I was already thinking about eating the snack cake.
* * *
The sun was high overhead when we hit the water. The airboat trip back into the canal took too long, and we were too late anyway. The wolves’ airboat was gone. Eli killed the engine, leaving us floating with the meager current, thinking. “They had another key,” he said.
“Looks like,” I agreed.
“I hate when the bad guys are smart enough to plan ahead.”
I opened an electronic tablet and pulled up the crime scene GPS locations, and compared them to the current crime scene, then layered them on a satellite map and showed it to Eli. He nodded and spun the airboat in a three-quarter turn before heading to the closest house, which was the house we had started out at the night before. No one was home. There was no scent of werewolf, no scent of blood. I figured they had smelled us on the beach and found another place to lair up, so we took a deeper turn into the swamp. That GPS location turned out to be a burned-out hulk. The
next place we got to was a falling-in mess of wind-damaged, water-damaged timbers, maybe the result of a hurricane—Katrina or Rita. Three places later, we were stumped, but we had no cell signal at all, to call the Kid for advice. So Eli texted his genius of a brother and we ate a late lunch: Brute wolfed down a three-pound roast that smelled a little rank, I ate most of the goodies in the pack Alex had made for me, and Eli ate a veggie and pulled pork sub sandwich he had hidden in a cooler in the bow. I thought he was sneaky to keep the sandwich for himself. He thought I was stupid for eating the “crap food” his brother packed for me. And we got Cokes all around.
You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a white werewolf drinking Coke from a bowl and then having a sneezing fit when the carbonation got up his nose. The laugh did me good, even if it did make Brute mad. Fortunately, before he could decide to fight me over the offense, we got a text from Alex accusing us of sitting on our butts. Dang cell phones were nothing more than tracking devices. We went back to searching. And the day went back to getting shorter and shorter. We were running out of time.
* * *
An hour before dusk, I said, “Let’s check back at the house that they used. The one we were at before Pea sent us off after the wolves. Maybe they circled back to it, thinking we wouldn’t.”
Eli didn’t reply, but moments later we were heading back along Lake Boudreaux and into the canals.
* * *
We raced by the house once, as if we were fishermen on the way elsewhere, studying the grounds. By daylight it was bigger than I had thought, with a long, two-story screened porch starting on ground level and the rest of the house up on stilts to protect it from hurricane surge. It stank of werewolves and blood and pain, which made my face contort in what might have been considered by some to be a really ugly smile.
Brute gave a low chuff, a darkly gratified sound I’d heard during the fight with the werewolves in the night. It was the sound he made when he got to kill something that needed killing. My eyes met the wolf’s icy ones and something exchanged between us. We might not like each other, but we understood each other. We were both killers of a sort. And I absolutely did not like that about myself.
Eli pulled the airboat to a halt far downwind, and turned off the engine. “Tromp back and attack by stealth or race back and execute a Normandy?” he asked. When I looked confused, he said, “The One Sixteenth hit the beach by daylight. World War Two.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Yeah. I remember my history lesson. They died like flies.”
“Beach the boat for a frontal attack, versus time and energy to muck it back overland, time when they might heal and be stronger.” He looked up at the sky and the sun that was already below the tree line. It would be dark soon. The moment the moon rose, they’d be stronger, healing the damage the silver bullets had caused, and helping to extrude the bullets. Always assuming they were still alive, of course.
Brute chuffed and stared back down the canal. An immediate beach landing was his vote. But I tilted my head, thinking about the low ground, the house’s floor plan, and even the foliage I’d seen as we raced by. “How about we point the airboat at the beach, but we all jump off before we get there? The boat makes a lot of noise from the beach side, gets their attention, draws them toward the water, and we take them from the rear.”
Brute yipped and grinned, his tongue hanging out to one side.
“Could work,” Eli said, turning my suggestion over in his mind.
Half joking, half provoking, I added to the wolf, “Keep out of the line of fire, dog-face. No one here likes you well enough to cut silver out of your hide.”
Brute narrowed his eyes at me, as if telling me that payback would be painful. But there was something different in his gaze this time. To call it friendlier was an overstatement, but maybe less animosity after the fights in the swamp and a day in a roaring airboat.
“Enough,” Eli said. “Jane, you drive. Angle in close to shore on the first pass. When you swerve to angle back out, the wolf and I’ll jump. Brute will head for the far side of the house; I’ll be in the trees for a clear shot. Take the boat down the canal a ways and then head back at speed for the Normandy. Make sure we get at least three minutes to get in place before you hit the beach.”
“Maybe I was stunned and not hearing right. Do I remember you telling me not to take so many chances? To be more careful?”
“If they’re in wolf form, you’ll have the advantage. They’ll have to charge you across open ground, giving Brute plenty of time to hamstring them, and you and me plenty of time to fill them full of silver. And the shooting angles should keep us out of the line of fire.”
“And,” I said, “if they’re in human form, all bets are off. They’ll shoot me, then Brute, then hunt you down and shoot you. This is Louisiana in the middle of nowhere with werewolves who hunt and take down humans like it’s a game. And eat them for supper, by moonlight. They’ll have guns.”
“Yeah.” Eli grinned, showing teeth. “That’s the most important part of the plan. Don’t get shot.” I didn’t roll my eyes, but it was a near thing. He turned on the airboat, put me in the driver’s seat, and gave me a quick tutorial. Once I was satisfied, I made sure my weapons were easy to hand and gunned it down the canal. I’d be glad if I never heard the sound again.
* * *
Eli’s plan would have worked except the wolves were on the beach when I roared up. They were in wolf form, waiting for the moon to rise. Or maybe they had smelled me as I roared past and decided to meet me head-on. Whatever.
It was too late to abort. I had still-shot visions of what might/could/would happen, no matter what decision I made. In half a second I saw what would happen if I tried to whirl the airboat back into the canal. The big wolf would jump on board and eat me. In the next half second, I saw what would happen if I raced along the water and tried to draw them after me. The big wolf would jump on board and eat me. In the final half second, I saw what would happen if I rammed the shore, hoping to break a few legs—hopefully not my own. And that seemed like my best shot. I yanked my seat belt tighter, braced my booted feel on the bench seat in front of me, and rammed the accelerator forward.
I’m pretty sure I was screaming the whole way.
The airboat hit the shore at full speed. I remembered to let off the acceleration only after I hit land. The boat dragged-slowed-stalled. Going from fast to a slewing, out-of-control crawl. The seat belt caught my weight and momentum, trying to cut me in two. My feet slid and flew forward. I reached to catch myself on the seat in front, and bumped wrong. My blade sailed out of my hand. And the dire werewolf leaped. I had another still-shot moment of his massive body, stretched out in the air. Fangs white and fierce.
He landed on me. It was like being hit by a . . . by a four-hundred-pound werewolf. But the boat and I were still in motion. His weight skewed the boat up on its side, around, and back into the water. His claws scrabbled into my hair and scalp, drawing blood. Across my side, abdomen, and hip. Digging deep. The boat kept tilting. Except for the seat belt, I’d have been over and into the water, held down by a monster. Instead the boat rolled over, into the shallow water.
The prop cage went deeper, the still-moving prop showering us hard with tiny, cutting water droplets. The engine whined and stopped. We rolled upside down, into the mud, and began to sink. The only thing holding us out of the water was the seat belt and the quickly sinking cage.
The wolf released his body-hugging embrace and fell into the water at an angle, his mouth an inch from my face. Snarling, snapping. His body was twisted and pinned by the seat back in front of me. I struggled to both pull a nine-mil and get the seat belt lose at the same time. Neither was working, with my body prisoned by the coiled safety straps.
I yanked a boot free and kicked the wolf’s jaw. His head whipped back. The boat sank farther, pulling his body under the surface of the water. Only his teeth and nostrils showed. My head was closer to the high end of the angled boat, but it was only seconds before
I’d go under too.
I stopped trying to get the gun free and used that hand and my feet to lift my weight off the seat belt. The narrow strap finally popped free. I caught my body on the seat bracing and pushed off into the water. The wolf’s head vanished under the surface in the same heartbeat. Bubbles came up from the muddy canal. “Yeah,” I huffed for breath as I swam, my weapons weighing me down into the mud. “Drown,” I said to him. “Please.”
The mud was sticky and deeper than my arms, and the canal seemed to have no actual bottom, just mud and mud and more mud, and things were buried in it that I didn’t want to touch but had no choice as I crawled toward shore.
As I crawled I heard growling and snarling and I saw Brute and two other werewolves fighting, the bitch and a small black male. The bitch had Brute by the ear and jaw, and he slung her hard, slamming her against a dock pillar while the black werewolf attacked Brute’s hindquarters, trying to hamstring him. The bitch held on, though I smelled blood.
Eli, his rifle to his shoulder, moved at a crouch from the low trees, watching for a shot, watching the house, and keeping an eye out for more wolves. I was still kneeling in about six inches of water when the three snarling, growling wolves rolled toward me in a mass of snapping teeth, claws, blood, and fur.
I pulled the nine-mil and took two shots into the black wolf’s side. He squealed and broke free, rolling from the fight, making an awful arrarrarr sound of doggy pain and surprise.
I aimed at the bitch. Eli raced into the line of fire, shouting my name. Just as something snared my boot and hauled me back into the water. And under.
The dire wolf had my ankle in his jaws and was backing through the mud. His coat and eyes were the color of the muddy water, and all I could see was his teeth. And my combat boot in his jaws. My heart hit like a jackhammer.
I don’t have nightmares of drowning. Or suffocation. Until he yanked me hard and my head went under. The mud and water was a thick, slimy consistency and if I gave in and took a breath, I’d be full of mud. And I’d die.