by Molly Harper
“And that’s why you needed me to stick around?” I asked. Jane nodded. “Well, that’s humiliating.”
“It happens to the best of us, hon,” Jolene assured me. “Now, just stand still, and don’t worry. We don’t bite.”
With a wink, Jolene transformed from two feet to four in a flash of light. I found comfort in the fact that I could finally lower my eyes. Jolene’s cold, wet wolf nose nudged at my hand, inhaling deeply. She walked in a narrow circle around me, sniffing and snorting. She whirled around, thumping her heavy tail against my thigh. The Jolene wolf barked sharply at the other wolves, and they swarmed around me, sniffing at my hands and legs. It was hard not to panic, being surrounded by that many huge predators, no matter how friendly and puppy-like they seemed.
Jolene sat on her haunches and waited while Jane hooked a pink leather collar around her neck. The vampire reached for a little black plastic box attached to the collar and switched on a green light.
“OK, Jolene, the GPS unit is on. When you’re ready, unleash wolfy hell.”
Jolene barked, a sharp, staccato sound. The other wolves straightened suddenly and turned to her, like soldiers falling to attention.
“Dick and I are going to follow them on foot,” Jane told me. She tossed a small black handheld device to Jed. “This is all set up. Follow as closely as you can in the truck. And if you get any hints that the situation has gone south, you get Anna back to the Hollow and into the Council offices as quickly as possible.”
Jed nodded. “Got it. Come on, Anna.”
The Jolene wolf yipped and launched herself into the trees, a furry missile on a mission. The other wolves moved as one flowing organism, following her in perfect sync. I climbed back into Jed’s huge black pickup truck. From behind the seat, Jed flipped forward two shoulder harness straps that clipped around the regular lap belt. Jed climbed into his own seat, plugging the small black device into the dashboard. When he turned the ignition, the video screen above the radio controls lit up, showing a map covered in green.
“We’re about to do some really ugly driving, aren’t we, Jed?”
Jed gave me a proud little boy’s smile as he strapped on his own harness. “Yes, we are.”
I expected a thrill of fear to sweep through my belly as I ran the potential outcomes of this situation. A crash, carsickness, getting lost in the woods with another man I didn’t know. But honestly, those seemed like minor inconveniences compared with what I’d already been through. My plane had crashed. I’d been way more than lost. Finn had betrayed me. I’d been through the worst-case scenarios, and I was fine. Exhausted and itching for violence but fine. And I would continue to be fine, no matter what happened, because I’d left that germ-wiping, stat-quoting, phobic girl on the plane.
“We’re following the signal from Jolene’s collar,” he said. “The trees are a little sparser here, so we have a pretty good chance of being able to squeeze through. And if we can’t, we’ll get to flatter, clearer ground until we can.”
“So when we catch up to Finn, what happens?” I asked as Jed revved the engine and pitched us forward through the tree line. “I was sort of afraid to ask before.”
“That’s up to Jane,” he said. “And you.”
I grabbed the canvas handle on the ceiling to steady myself as the truck sped over uneven ground, my stomach rolling as the truck pitched and tilted. I immediately regretted everything I’d eaten since finding the inn. But I figured werewolf-following was a non-pit-stop activity. To take my mind off my inner turmoil, I asked Jed, “So you’re a shapeshifter. What’s that like?”
“Never met one before, huh?”
“Well, once, but she wasn’t really up for conversation. She was more of a ‘punch Anna in the face first, engage in polite conversation maybe later’ type,” I told him. “According to Friar Thomas, some shifters can only change at night. Is that the case with your family?”
“We thought so for a while, but it turns out we can shift whenever we feel like it.” Jed paused and put the truck into a lower gear to roll over a fallen log. “My family thought we were cursed for generations. We thought—and it sounds so stupid now—but we thought that we could only shift when the moonlight hit our skin.”
“But there’s nothing about that in any of the lore,” I told him.
“Yeah, well, we ran afoul of a witch a couple of generations back, and she was awfully good at the power of suggestion,” he said. “We think she was able to sense the change coming and took advantage of our not knowin’ about it.”
“Friar Thomas would say that the magical vapors in that generation’s blood had mixed in just the right combination to bring out your ability,” I told him. When Jed frowned, I added, “Friar Thomas wasn’t familiar with the concept of DNA.”
Jed made an indignant noise in his throat. “We were just scared and worried about passing the shiftin’ along to the next generation. The Trudeau clan is the largest group of shifters in the Southeastern states, and we didn’t know what we were or why suddenly certain members of the family could turn into scary monsters in the middle of the night. That’s how closed off we are from the rest of the supernatural world. My Nola, she helped us understand it a little better, but when Jane said she’d found a book that might be able to help us get better control of the shifts, maybe even find other packs of shifters? Well, I may have gotten my family’s hopes up a little bit. I shouldn’t have said anything to them.”
“I’m sorry, Jed. I can’t apologize enough.”
He waved my concerns away with a casual toss of his hand. “Please, Anna, of everybody involved in this situation, you’re the one who fought like hell to do your job. Did you foul up along the way? Sure. Did you trust the wrong man? OK. Did you sleep with that man, against your better judgment? I’m guessin’ yes.”
“Hey, Jed, stop trying to make me feel better.”
“My point—and I’m not good at making them, so just bear with me—was that you survived a plane crash and a trek through some pretty ugly country, with no supplies or gear, all to get a job done? That’s pretty badass.”
I rolled my eyes. I didn’t feel badass. I felt like an idiot. And I wanted to tell Jed that I’d only survived because Finn had helped me along the way. But then, he hadn’t been with me while I walked through that daylit, wasp-infested wilderness. He hadn’t been with me when I’d faced off with She-Hulk the Shapeshifter. I had made it through some of the hardest parts of my journey alone. Maybe I was a tiny bit badass.
“Thank you, Jed.”
“You’re welcome.”
I stared out the window, watching the trees fly by as Jed worked the stick shift like a teenager controlling his favorite video game. We covered miles and miles in what seemed like a ridiculously short amount of time. How much easier would it have been for me and Finn if we’d had this truck? We would have made it out of the woods in a matter of hours instead of days. And we would have slept in one hundred percent fewer caves, I was guessing. Then again, we would have spent way less time skinny-dipping, and there would have been a drastic reduction in cave-snuggling.
I watched as the little red dot on the video screen suddenly veered right and then stopped. Jed slowed the truck to a smooth stop and watched the screen. When it became apparent that the dot was not moving, he switched off the ignition and pressed a finger to his lips. I nodded and unfastened my harness. Jed unhooked the small GPS device and climbed out of the truck. I landed on quiet feet, careful not to step on any branches while I followed Jed away from the truck. He watched the screen, following the coordinates from Jolene’s collar, which still hadn’t changed. I supposed this meant that Jolene had found Finn.
Was Jolene’s pack waiting in the woods, ready to spring on Finn and whoever he was meeting? I didn’t know how to feel about that, partially because I didn’t want Finn to be hurt by werewolf fangs and partially because I wanted to do the hurting myself.
A message popped up on the video screen from Jane. Get here NOW. Jed grabbed my
elbow, running through the woods toward the dot. I was pleased to find that with water in my system and tightly tied boots on my feet, I could keep up with him. Of course, there were limits to my newfound stamina, and fortunately, I hit that limit right around the time we found Jane and the wolves standing in a huddled group.
In the distance, I could see headlights shining through the trees, and I could hear voices and laughter. It sounded like a kegger in the middle of the forest. I sincerely hoped that we hadn’t just stumbled onto some hapless hunting party, because they were about to get the Pabst Blue Ribbon scared out of them.
Jolene transformed to human while her cousins stayed on four paws. I kept my gaze above Jolene’s shoulders.
“You’re sure?” Jane asked quietly.
Jolene nodded. “Unless our new friend here has been rollin’ around with a bunch of drunk hunters.”
I hissed indignantly, swinging my gaze to Jolene and catching a full-on visual of her breasts. “Watch it.”
Jolene gave me what I can only call a wolfish grin.
“So, Jane, you want to do a quiet, subtle ‘vampire appears like a puff of smoke’ thing or a more dramatic, full-on werewolf storming of the beach?”
Jane grinned at me. “Oh, I think I have an idea.”
Jane and I ever so casually walked toward the lights, knowing that Jed and the werewolves were hiding in the trees. As we got closer, I could see several SUVs parked in a semicircle with their headlights on high. Their lights shone on a group of a dozen or so people all huddled around a familiar figure, who was holding the book aloft, loudly declaring that it was “the real deal” and he could tell because of the silk stitching on the binding and the lead-based ink used by the author.
Only it wasn’t the familiar figure I was expecting.
“Michael?”
There stood Michael Malone, Ph-freaking-D. Handsome, golden Michael, with the same sparkling blue eyes and stupidly adorable butt dimple in his chin, among a group of hulking blond giants. And despite my most fervent wishes, he had not gone bald or toothless or been injured in a tragic acid explosion. Worse yet, he was holding A Contemplation on Shifters in his hands, showing it off to the crowd, opening it wide enough to endanger the delicate material of the binding—with his dirty bare hands, exposing the fragile pages to the damaging oils of his skin. Anyone who cared about books, or at least claimed to be a scholar, would know better than to handle a priceless work without any attempts to protect it. Why didn’t Michael go ahead and use the table of contents as a napkin while he was at it?
“Kind of ruined the element of surprise there,” Jane muttered out of the side of her mouth.
“Really, of all the clandestine, illegal artifact transactions you could have showed up for, it had to be this one?” I demanded, as the blond shifters whirled toward us.
The seconds that ticked by, the seconds it took for him to remember my face, were so infuriating that a haze of red mist crept into the edges of my vision. There was a serious danger of a vein in my forehead exploding, but that didn’t seem nearly as important as trying to find some way to jam Michael’s head up his own ass.
“Uh . . . Anna, how nice to see you!” he said.
“Oh, do not pretend like you don’t remember me, you lying, plagiarizing, knuckle-dragging Ken doll!”
In the distance, I heard a familiar snicker. I peered into the blinding brightness of the headlights. Finn appeared to be strapped facedown to the hood of a truck with bungee cords, like a freshly shot deer, with a bandanna knotted around his mouth.
OK, maybe the Kelleys were growing on me a little bit.
“Finn, I wish I could say I was surprised by this,” Jane called.
Finn jerked his shoulders, looking exasperated by the whole thing.
“I’ll deal with you later,” I told Finn as he manipulated the gag out of his mouth. “Seriously, Michael, what are you doing here? Are you telling me that you’re using the doctorate you stole from me to horn in on my very limited, specialized field, and now you’re trying to swipe artifacts from me, too? Do you have a shred of originality anywhere in your body?”
“Look, I know you had a rough time with the way things . . . ended between us, but I can’t believe you would track me down like this, while I’m working. It’s just so unprofessional.”
Jane grabbed my arm before I could spring forward at him. She stepped between me and the rough-hewn blonds who were slowly edging toward us. They scanned us from head to toe, as if they were gauging the threat we posed. Their eyes shifted immediately from me to Jane, because—despite the murder eyes I was giving my former paramour—I guessed I ranked somewhere near “cranky Pomeranian” in terms of my estimated potential for violence.
And then a tall woman, her arm in a sling, pushed through the shifters, glaring at me. And while I was thrilled that she wasn’t dead, my old friend She-Hulk did not look happy to see me. Or possibly the swelling around the eyes just made it look like she was glowering. Also, her face was riddled with hornet stings, which just made the glowering scarier.
“You,” she hissed. “You’re mine.”
“That’s fair,” I conceded. “I am responsible for your face looking like that.”
She-Hulk’s male cousins snickered, and her glowering increased tenfold.
Jane gave me extreme side-eye. “You just make friends wherever you go, don’t you?”
I dutifully avoided eye contact.
“Who the hell are you, lady?” the biggest of the blonds demanded. He looked like a hungover Viking, with a big barrel chest, a full, bushy golden beard, and heavy bags under his Delft-blue eyes. Given the way the other shifters shrank from him, I guessed he was in charge.
“I am Jane Jameson-Nightengale, the rightful owner of that extremely fragile book that—Michael, is it?” Michael offered Jane his familiar winsome smile, but Jane was having none of it. “That Michael is handling so carelessly.”
“Right?” I exclaimed, making Jane shake her head sympathetically.
“I appreciate that you put a lot of planning and effort into hijacking a plane, attempting a midair James Bond–style theft, and trying to murder my employee, I really do. I mean, the deposits alone must have been insane. But that book is my property. I have plans for it, and I will be taking it back,” Jane told them, holding out an imperious hand, as if it were a foregone conclusion that they would just hand over her lost property.
I got a distinctly uneasy feeling about the way they laughed at that . . . and the way they were closing in around us . . . and the way Michael was backing out of the circle, clutching the book to his chest. Again, with his bare hands. I was having a hard time letting that go.
“Is that right?” The Viking sneered. “How exactly do you think you’re going to do that? There’s two of you and a lot more of us.”
Jane pursed her lips, an expression of distinct annoyance marring her even features. “Look, I didn’t want to play this card, but maybe you should think twice before you steal from a representative of the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead.”
Each and every one of the shifters froze, and their heads simultaneously whipped toward the Viking. Who looked like he wanted to throw up. “What?”
Finn cackled. “You didn’t know Jane works for the Council?”
“You didn’t say anything about it! It’s bad enough, you makin’ us follow you to this hick town for the drop-off. And you’re just now telling us that we’re stealing from the Council?” the Viking shouted back. He snarled at me. “And you! You never said anything about working for a Council representative!”
“I don’t work for you!” I cried. “It wasn’t my job to tell you who you were stealing from! And Finn didn’t know about Jane until after the plane crashed. Thanks for that, by the way.”
“I said I was sorry!” Finn called back.
“We—we put my name up on the Council Web site!” Jane exclaimed. “What is the point of having a Web site if all the other monsters don’t bother t
o read it? Honestly!”
“She even set up a Twitter account,” I told the shifters, patting her shoulder sympathetically.
“Well, Gigi set it up,” Jane grumbled. “But I approve the tweets!”
The Viking shook his head. “Twitter wha?”
“It’s all about making the Council more accessible,” Jane said. Behind her, I could see Finn wriggling out of his restraints, shrugging off the bungee cords. “A major public relations undertaking I’ve spent months arguing for with the international board. There’s so much about the Council that the general public doesn’t know, and that leads to distrust. For instance, we require that each local Council office do a charity toy drive for needy children every Christmas. New vampires are now required to take orientation classes and complete at least ten hours of community service in their first year post-turning. And did you know that as a Council member, I have this little personal alarm?” She raised her hand, showing them what looked like a keyless-entry fob for a car. “When I press this button, it summons a furry, angry cavalry.”
In a perfectly timed dramatic entrance, the werewolves exploded from the trees, accompanied by Dick Cheney, two big vampires dressed in black SWAT gear, and a bipedal great white shark. In response, the Kelley shapeshifters transformed into two-legged armadillos, giant sloths, the creature from the Alien movies, and several trolls. Once again, I had to wonder whether I had actually died in the plane crash and this was a prolonged hallucination brought on by a lack of oxygen.
Arms swinging, Jane jumped into the fray. She hopped onto the back of a giant Cthulhu-type monster I believed to be the drunk Viking, locking her legs around his neck. Finn made a beeline for me, but a huge bipedal crocodile monster jumped in between us. The wave of werewolves bowled over the shifters, because, after all, the latter weren’t actually transforming into the scary monsters. They only had the appearance of those monsters, a panic response in the face of so many predators with real fangs and claws. Still, I had to respect the fact that they stayed in these foreign forms even when they didn’t do them any good.