Faith Hunter: Jane Yellowrock World Companion

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.”