Tobias cocked his head with innocent curiosity. “I’m here as Maven’s representative,” I said quietly. “Show me that you understand.”
The enormous wolf didn’t respond right away, and after a moment I started to feel ridiculous. But then Tobias thrust his muzzle up quickly before moving it down and up again, and I realized it was a parody of a human nod. “Good. An hour after sunset, I’ll be by your back fence with a vampire. We have some questions. You will be there, and you will be in human form.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the small metal object Maven had given me, making sure he saw the .45 caliber bullet that had been hand-poured out of silver. Some of the legends are true, Maven had said, sounding bemused. All of the Old World species came with their little vulnerabilities. The vampires were allergic to daylight, the werewolves to silver. And of course it was painfully easy to kill witches.
Well, most of us.
“Do you understand?” I asked. Another pause, and then Tobias shook himself, showing me a long, slow yawn. I had five dogs at home; I recognized this as Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I do what I want.
“Try me,” I told him fiercely, hearing the hatred in my voice. “I’d love that.”
“Miss?” Phil called, hurrying back toward me. I quickly shoved the bullet back into my pocket. “Please step away from Tobias. He is not a pet . . .”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I muttered under my breath.
Chapter 11
The sky was already darkening as the tour wrapped up at five. I spent a few minutes nonchalantly buying postcards in the gift shop—paying with cash, of course. I thanked Christy the receptionist and Phil the tour guide, and strolled out to the car like I didn’t have a care in the world. If anything happened tonight, I wanted to look like any other tourist visiting the wolf sanctuary. The place closed in a half an hour, so we were cutting the timing pretty close, but it was a necessary risk: We needed to figure out what was happening with the werewolves and resolve it quickly, before Hazel found out something was up. And we didn’t want to give Tobias any time to contact the other werewolves, just in case he had some way of doing so.
I drove back down the dirt road that led to the sanctuary, taking a few extra turns before I pulled over on a long stretch of road with no people or cars. I twisted around in my seat, knocked on the long, flat compartment where the backseat was supposed to be, and stepped out of Maven’s Jeep with my cell phone in hand. For some reason, I didn’t want to see Quinn climbing out of the vampire box. Assuring myself that I was just giving him some privacy, I leaned against my door and dialed Simon’s number. If anyone drove by, they’d assume I had a flat tire and was calling AAA.
When he answered, I could hear talking and music in the background, which implied he was still on campus. “Hey,” I said loudly. “How’s the hairball research?”
“Gastric pellet,” he said reflexively. “Hang on, let me get somewhere quieter.”
There was a pause, and I turned around to peek at Quinn. He was sitting calmly in the driver’s seat, right behind me, and I jumped, startled. He smirked and gave me a little wave. I stuck my tongue out at him, then circled the Jeep to climb into the passenger seat. Simon still hadn’t returned to the phone. “Early this morning, the police found a bundle of slimy clothes with a human hip bone buried inside,” I explained to Quinn. “Simon thinks it’s a gastric pellet from an enormous reptile that’s also the Rosetta Stone for magical systemics.”
Quinn’s face remained as inscrutable as ever, but he did give me one long, slow blink. “You have a serious gift for summary,” he deadpanned.
I grinned. “Thank you.”
Simon got back on the phone. “Okay, I’m here.”
“Did you find anything?” I asked him, holding up a finger to Quinn. Which was stupid, because he could probably hear Simon as well as I could.
“Yes and no.” Simon sounded exhausted, and I wondered if Lily had stopped to check on him. “There haven’t been any reports about giant lizards anywhere in Colorado, and I went back ten years. I’ve been checking records for fossil finds around here too, but the results are inconclusive.”
“Inconclusive how?”
He sighed. “There are thousands of dinosaur finds in Colorado, Lex. Not all of the remains have been identified. Plus there are things like preserved footprints and coprolites with no identified source.”
I had taken some of my cousin’s kids to the Dinosaur Resource Center in Colorado Springs; I knew coprolites were fossilized poop. “Hang on, you’re saying you think this thing is a dinosaur?” I didn’t bother keeping the skepticism out of my voice.
“No, not really. Its behavior doesn’t match our knowledge about any previously identified species.” There was a pause. “And I’m not convinced it has legs.”
Quinn’s eyebrow arched with curiosity. “Wait, what?” I said.
“This afternoon I went over to Chautauqua, where they found the pellet,” Simon explained hurriedly. “There wasn’t much to see, but I did notice some displaced dirt and loose soil, like something had dug a big hole that had caved back in on itself. The police barely noticed it, but I think this thing could be a burrower, a big one. It would explain why there weren’t any tracks.”
“Huh.” I looked at Quinn, but he shrugged, as baffled as I was. I needed to think that over for a while, so I changed tack. “Did the police make any progress on identifying bones?”
“Not that I know of,” Simon said wryly. “Since it’s obviously magic related, we can’t give them too much information. I backed up their hypothesis about it being a science cadaver from the college, so there’s no reason for them to keep me in the loop at this point.”
Quinn motioned for me to put the phone on speaker. “Simon? Quinn’s here with me. You’re on speaker.”
“Oh,” Simon said, a little surprised. “How’s it going, Tall, Dark, and Undead?”
Quinn, whose hair was as blond as Daniel Craig’s, rolled his eyes. “Can it, Dungeon Master. Listen, do you need some assistance with getting information from the police?”
A pause. “Not at this point, but it may come to that.”
I winced. Quinn was talking about pressing the cops to believe whatever Simon told them about the pellet. I didn’t like that, not the least because my cousin would be one of them. Despite my two arrests, I felt a little protective of the Boulder Police. With the exception of Keller, all of them had been decent to me.
Quinn must have seen me flinch, because he gave me a little “it is what it is” shrug. I didn’t like that, either, but we both knew this was what I had signed on for. “Okay, one other thing,” Quinn said to Simon. “You said you checked fossil finds. What about local folklore?”
There was a long pause while both Simon and I were impressed with Quinn. “That’s a good idea, thanks. I’ll get into it.”
When I hung up with Simon, Quinn raised his eyebrows at me. “Hi,” he said, smiling.
For some reason the fact that he smiled, instead of giving me his usual unreadable expression, made me flush. “Hi.”
“Ready to go question a werewolf?”
The smile faded from my face.
We parked a half mile away from the sanctuary and hiked back down the road until we reached the outer fence, the same one I’d driven past on the way up the driveway. It was still light enough for me to see eyeshine reflected back at us, as the penned wolves silently watched our approach through the fencing. They still didn’t bark or whine, but this time when I walked up, every single one of them was pacing back and forth in their individual spaces, agitated and skittish. I watched their body language and realized they weren’t hoping to attack us. They were hoping to flee.
“What’s got them all riled up?” I murmured.
I caught Quinn’s sidelong glance. “How would you feel if your neighbor suddenly and rather violently changed into another animal in front of you?”
“Good point.” I counted paddocks as we walked, and stopped when we rea
ched the back fence of the fourth enclosure. “This is it.”
I peered past the double fence, looking for a glimpse of Tobias. I had brought a flashlight, but I didn’t want to turn it on until absolutely necessary. I didn’t see any cars, and the building lights were off, but the sanctuary employees could still be around. There were five or six large trees in Tobias’s space, and between the growing darkness and the trees’ shade, I saw nothing. Quinn reared an arm back and threw a rough blanket from the back of the Jeep over both of the fences. It fluttered a bit but landed true, well within Tobias’s enclosure. I was hoping it would be enough to tempt him to come out, but nothing stirred in the enclosure.
“Do you see him?” I said under my breath, hoping Quinn’s vampire eyesight would serve us better than mine.
“No. Wait . . .” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Quinn’s head tilting up. “Look in the—”
There was a tremendous crash, and a skinny, naked form dropped out of the nearest tree, no more than six feet away.
I jumped, but managed to suppress the shriek that threatened to erupt from my throat. He’d annoyed me, though, and I rather vindictively clicked on the flashlight and shone it right at his face.
“Owwwwww,” Tobias complained, dropping instinctively into a crouch. He held up one hand to shield his eyes. In his human form, the werewolf was average height, slender, with ropy limbs and dun-colored hair that stood up in angry tufts like he’d been pulling on it. His blue eyes glared at me. “Just funny,” he sputtered, and then more carefully, he said, “Joke-telling, I was joke-telling.” His face creased into a frown. “Joke-being, maybe.”
Quinn gave me a questioning look, but I just shrugged. I’d met a crazy werewolf in Los Angeles who made Tobias look downright coherent. As far as I was concerned, werewolf magic was called a curse for a reason.
Tobias went over to the horse blanket, wobbling a little on his two legs. He scooped it up carelessly and wrapped it around his belly, tucking it in like a towel. I moved the beam of the light toward his chest, and he relaxed, his fingers reaching up to casually grip the fence near his face. Taking charge, Quinn stepped forward so he was right up against our side of the fence. “My name is Quinn,” he said in the same cool, distant tone he’d used when we first met, when I was the one being questioned. “I work for Maven.”
Tobias glared at me. “Silver girl,” he growled.
Aw. He remembered me. “Lex,” I corrected him. “I work for Maven too.” It still felt weird saying it out loud.
“In charge now Maven in charge now,” Tobias said in the same odd, jarring cadence, like he was having a hard time modulating his volume and tone.
Quinn and I exchanged another look in the light leaking from my flashlight. Maven had only usurped Itachi a couple of weeks ago. “So they visit you,” I said casually. “The other werewolves.”
Tobias’s tongue snaked out, swiping the air in front of his face. Then he seemed to remember himself, his form. “Yes, visit,” he agreed. “Brothers-sisters too.”
“When?” Quinn asked. “When were they here last?”
Still gripping the fence with his fingers, Tobias leaned backward, swaying back and forth. “Moons and suns ago,” he sang.
I rolled my eyes. Of course the idiot had no concept of time. “Who, Tobias?” I asked. “Who comes to visit?”
The werewolf gave me a perfectly human look that clearly suggested I might be daft. “Brothers and sisters,” he said again, more loudly this time.
“Names? You must know their names.”
Tobias nodded. “Mary-Cammie-Ryan-Matt-Alex-Jamie,” he said happily.
“Last names?” Quinn asked. “You know, surnames?”
Tobias shrugged, humming to himself.
Quinn made a frustrated sound at the back of his throat, but I pushed on. I wanted to get this over with and get the hell away from this thing. “Do they all come at once?” I asked. “Many brothers and sisters? Or only one at a time?”
He cocked his head, as if it took him a moment to translate the meaning of my question. “One, two to talk,” he said, his voice maintaining at least an even volume now. “Talk to Tobias, ’cause Tobias won’t talk back.”
“They come to see you when they need someone to talk to?” I translated.
He nodded, looking relieved that I understood.
“Tobias, the last full moon was five nights ago,” Quinn said in a patient voice. “Has anyone visited you since then?”
The werewolf cocked his head again, untangling Quinn’s words, and then he giggled. “Five nights . . . moon lines called. Call me still.” The mirth left his face and he looked almost solemn. Reverent, even. “Call me now.”
I had no idea what that meant, but before either of us could ask, Tobias leaped backward, his makeshift skirt slipping off his waist, and threw himself against the fence in the adjacent corner of his cage. We raced along our side of the fence in time to see Tobias’s body crash into the chain link with a sickening screech of metal. The werewolf stumbled backward, blood streaming from his nose, which must have hit the chain link wrong. As soon as he recovered his footing he ran at the fence again. “Stop!” I cried, but he ignored me. This time he bounced off and fell flat on his back on the ground, writhing with pain. The blood from his nose had already stopped—werewolves could heal even faster than vampires—but he whimpered with pain anyway.
Quinn shot me a horrified look. Maven had warned us that Leine was unstable, but this was way past “a little off” and well into Cuckoo’s Nest territory. I jogged along the fence until I was right in front of Tobias and crouched down. “Tobias, are you okay?”
“Don’t want to we don’t want to,” he moaned.
“Tobias, what happened on the full moon?” I asked desperately.
“Don’t want to we don’t want to,” he sang again, lifting his throat to turn the words into a howl.
The sound of answering howls rose from the dark enclosures all around us. I looked nervously at Quinn. Would other people hear that? Did the sanctuary wolves often howl at night, or was this exceptional? The noise went on for several minutes in long, fluted sounds that rose and fell discordantly. When it finally died down, I tried again. “Tobias? What is it you don’t want to do?”
The look he gave me was filled with desperate frustration, and it struck me as eerily familiar—it was the same expression Charlie had when she was trying to communicate what she wanted, but couldn’t make her mouth form the right words yet. “Don’t. Want. To.” he said blearily, and then he staggered to his feet and ran at the fence a third time.
“Stop it!” I shouted, but he didn’t stop. When he fell to the ground this time he was bleeding from several gashes on his chest. He lifted his throat and howled again, and once again the wolves around us joined in.
“Let’s go,” Quinn urged, tugging at my elbow. “This isn’t getting us anywhere, and someone’s going to hear them.”
I allowed him to pull me to my feet, and we began hurrying along the fence. “The blanket!” I remembered, turning back.
“It’s fine, they’ll assume some tourist threw it in,” Quinn replied, but I’d already paused, my light pointing back at Tobias. Quinn stopped too.
“What is it?” he asked when I didn’t move.
I watched the werewolf, who had crawled to his feet and was now standing inches from that same corner of the fence, letting his body fall against it over and over again. I turned my own body so I was facing the same direction, then squinted toward my right, where the dying sun had disappeared. “Quinn,” I breathed. “The direction.”
“What about it?”
“He’s facing south.” I stopped mimicking Tobias and turned back to my partner. “Toward Colorado.”
Chapter 12
“Moon lines.”
Maven’s voice was thoughtful, like she was sampling the way the words tasted in her mouth. Tonight she was wearing purple leggings and an orange corduroy jumper that didn’t quite match her orange hair. I was
pretty sure she’d purchased the whole ensemble in 1995. “That phrase sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. What else did he say?”
We were crammed into her tiny office, having driven straight to Magic Beans from Wyoming. I didn’t love being in a space this small, but I sat near the door and kept an eye on the little window that looked out on the large event room. “Not much, really,” Quinn replied. “He kept saying ‘we’ didn’t want to, and then he’d run at the fence. Toward the south.”
“I think he was trying to say they didn’t want to invade Colorado, but they didn’t have a choice,” I added. “Something is forcing them. Witches can’t use magic on werewolves, so maybe it’s their alpha?” I thought of the demented wannabe alpha who’d killed my sister. What was forcing one werewolf to run into a fence, compared to that?
“If it were just one pack, just one attack, that might be it,” Maven mused. “But I still can’t see the Wyoming werewolves and the eastern Utah pack working together. It goes against their basic territorial instinct.”
“I don’t know, then,” Quinn said, and if I hadn’t been looking, I would have missed the frustration on his face.
“Neither do I.” Maven’s voice was contemplative. Her eyes unfocused for a moment as she dug through her memory, but then shook her head, not catching it. I wondered what it was like, trying to remember things that had happened tens or even hundreds of years ago. I barely remembered high school.
There was a knock on Maven’s office door, and a heavyset young man poked his head in, pushing trendy thick-rimmed glasses up on his nose. “Hey, Maven. Oh hi, Lex, Quinn.” I lifted one hand in a wave, and Quinn gave the kid a stony nod. We’d both met Maven’s most recent hire, a twenty-five-year-old human named Ryan. He was the daytime manager of the coffee shop, and Maven’s all-around errand boy, who had to give the occasional unwitting blood donation. That was my suspicion, anyway—the kid was always pale—but he seemed content enough, and it was none of my business.
Boundary Lines (Boundary Magic Book 2) Page 7