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Nice change of subject, Kat. "Timber wolf. I'm a Sunru
"Loup-garou." She made a note on her ever-present little journalist's pad. The design stamped into the leather cover—a cross inside a circle—made sense now. "Or are you dents-soleil? Sunru
She'd done her research, all right. The only wonder was that she hadn't noticed before. But we're careful, we Sunru
"Then go wait outside." She made another note while I stared at the fall of her hair, paleness streaked with pure gold. "You're being a nuisance."
"You're breaking my heart. I'm hungry." My stomach gurgled. She'd been at it for hours. I shifted in the hard wooden chair. Why didn't these places ever have comfortable chairs? "Really hungry."
"Whiner. I suppose you want to try that greasy-spoon diner you've been looking at so longingly." She closed her notebook with a snap and turned off the machine. "We might as well. I can't work with you poking at me like this."
"I thought this was a honeymoon."
"It is." She turned in her chair and gave me one of those dazzling smiles. The kind that hits right below the belt and spreads like a supernova. "But we can't just let a nest breed out here, you know. We're in the area, we need to do something about it."
"The population can't support more than a few suckers out here. They're creatures of opportunity." I'm surprised we're not hearing more about cattle mutilations, actually. Or pigs getting bled out.
"Look, we killed two last night. Those kids disappeared afterward. That's just too much of a coincidence. It's a statistical outlier unless there's a nest out here. A nest will breed if the population starts rising, which it has been—did you look at the bed-and-breakfasts around here? This is a town on the edge of being a city. A stubborn nest in this area when the population explodes is a recipe for disaster. We have to do something." Her eyes shone with optimism.
"An analyst and a single Sunru
But the thought of a nest, with its stink and claustrophobic, sweltering heat, and my Kat in the middle… She pushed herself up, scraping the chair back along green linoleum. "I think we'll be all right. We can't just let a nest mushroom out here, Mitch."
Now what could I say to that? I settled for hooking my arm over her shoulders. "I'm hungry. Let's go eat." We're only here for another night, anyway.
"I told Mrs. Evans we'd be staying another week." She slid her arm around my waist and did the trick of moving someone twice her size for the door. "We'll hit the fiche again after you have your corn-fried lard. There's some interesting things here. Did you know this town's been here since 1784?"
My Kat. Put an obstacle in her path and she just rolls right over it without noticing.
I was going to have to find some other way of keeping her out of trouble.
THE DINER WAS ON THE MAIN DRAG, A cheerful little place with red-checked curtains in the window and air-conditioning working overtime. Most of the customers were truckers or locals, and no few of them stared when Kat waltzed in the door, with her white cotton tank top and skintight jeans, her hair a bright ba
Kat paged back through her notes. "Kids have been disappearing around here for a while. I've found an average of one disappearance a month for as far back as the newspapers go on microfiche. Which, granted, isn't far, only until about 1932. There was some sort of fire that destroyed old records."
I took another bite of my burger, chewed thoughtfully. Next to her I felt even scruffier than usual. Stubble had broken out along my jaw and my eyes felt sandy after all the dust. My jacket creaked, and my sneakers were almost worn through. The heat was already wet and clinging, a fine sheen of sweat standing out on Kat's skin, and I liked it. With a higher-than-human metabolism fueling denser muscle and bone, heat bleeds. I spent one winter in Maine and almost froze my ass off unless I was wearing my fur.
"Howza food?" The waitress was probably forty but looked more like fifty-five, with aggressively-large hair reeking of Aqua Net and bourbon. "Freshen up yah coffee?"
"It's great. Thank you." My words sounded clipped and unhelpful next to her down-home drawl. We waited until she was gone. "That's a lot of kids missing," I said thoughtfully. "I didn't know they had that many around here."
"I hear they have them in job lots, but still. You'd think someone would say something. But it's on the back pages, never makes a lot of news, and I can't help but think…"
"It seems a nice little town." And Cotton Crossing was, quiet in a prosperous way. The Appalachian kitsch mixed nicely with antebellum graciousness, to the tune of columns and Confederate flags as well as public buildings from the New Deal era.
Kat took a mouthful of fries and poked at her French dip. "There's enough grease in this to clog my arteries just looking at it." She took a long pull of her orange juice and made a small face, probably reminded of her first Southern iced-tea debacle. They drink it sweet enough to rot teeth down there. "Yes, it's a nice little town. But the media should be ail over kids disappearing. And teenagers are statistically higher at risk for—"
"Well hello there, good-lookin'." A heavyset man passing the table tipped his hat to Kat, who smiled and nodded. She gets that a lot.
It was enough to make a man feel territorial. But then Kat turned her baby blues back to me and promptly forgot about John Doe Hick, dropping her voice to a confidential murmur. "It's just weird. Do the math, Mitch."
Almost a thousand kids. I know humans are sometimes careless with their pups, something no Sunru
"No, just a couple hours. Then we're going to the courthouse to check out birth and death rates, since this is a county seat." She took a ladylike bite of roast beef. "We'll go back to Mrs. Evans's and crunch some numbers."
"Numbers." I tried not to moan. "Come on, Kat."
"You'll like it. Crunching numbers makes me want to undress you."
I suddenly couldn't wait to get through with lunch.
STICKY JASMINE-LADEN AIR BREATHED AGAINST MY NECK AND back, my T-shirt immediately clinging like Saran Wrap. Kat leaned against the porch railing, framed by trellises full of green leaves and little white star-shaped flowers. Dusk was a purple bruise in the sky, and Kat's white sundress a floating ghost, straps creasing her tender shoulders.
I rested my elbows on the railing next to hers and leaned against her despite the heat. "Hey, pretty lady."
"Hey, Rover." Her smile took the sting out of it. "Look at that."
The garden spilled away in regimented rows, flowers nodding as nightly exhalation came off the mountains and down into the valley cupping Cotton Crossing. From here you could see the dusty curve of the road and Lover's Leap, a crag of sharp rock thrust out from summer growth under the worn-down nub of the mountain. It pointed at the town like an accusing finger.