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Kat gave a weak smile as I peeled the ice away from her forehead. "What a nice man." Flat and ironic, and completely for Evans's benefit. "Do I look ready to bolt, Mitch?"
"You look beautiful." I took one of the teas, so Kat didn't have to, and she grabbed for the glass of water, reading my mind.
"You're a good liar." But she smiled. We were bloody, battered, and aching. But we'd gotten off lightly, and I knew it.
"I'VE BEEN THINKING," KAT ROLLED OVER, WINCING, AND I suppressed a groan.
"Jesus. Do you have to?" I ached, and the bacon and eggs Evans had whipped up for me sat heavy in my stomach no matter how much of the pitcher of sweet tea I poured down. I was more nauseated than I should have been, my body craving protein to fuel muscle repair. Kat's desire for a salad was met with something made of cucumbers, tomatoes still warm from the sun, and fresh mozzarella in an olive-oily sauce. She liked it, but had eaten very little.
I'd started packing as soon as we hit our suite, stopping only to take bites off the piping-hot plate. Kat had picked at her food and gone to bed.
Packing didn't seem to be so much fun when I looked at the shape of her under the sheet. Still, I kept at it.
"I thought you loved me for my mind." She was smeared with thick green mugwort—and—holy water paste, drying and flaking off now, and the green smell mixed with the rest of her made my entire spine go cold.
Bitten. Second time in as many days she could have been seriously hurt. Goddamn. "Mind's no good without the body to put it in, sweetpea. Three suckheads—"
"—acting completely uncharacteristically. Seems like someone wants to stop my research."
The air conditioner droned under the silence that followed.
God damn the woman. "Kat." I struggled for control. "We're leaving at dawn. You can call the Argentum from the next town. We'll stop in a place that has a Starbucks and more than three stoplights, not to mention a decent Italian restaurant. I'll get you drunk on chianti and take advantage of you and we'll wend our way toward Disney World. Florida's nice this time of year."
"I don't want to go to Disney World. Do you want to hear what I was thinking about or not?"
I stuffed some T-shirts into my suitcase, higgledy-piggledy. "All right. Fine. But we're leaving tomorrow morning. You'd better get some sleep."
"I didn't sit down on the bench because I had a thought. It struck me there was a pattern to most of the disappearances. In most of the newspaper reports Lover's Leap is mentioned." She moved gingerly, settling herself again with a sigh. "Come over here, Mitch. I'm lonely."
Normally I would have burned up the carpet getting my shaggy ass into bed. Right now I jammed a pair of jeans into the suitcase and remembered the clothes we had soaking in the washer. "Be right there."
"You're being ridiculous. I say we go take a closer look at Lover's Leap tomorrow morning."
You're calling me ridiculous? "No way, Kat. Absolutely no way, nohow. No."
"You can stay here if you're scared, Fido. But I want to do some scouting. I'll call in before we go, it shouldn't take someone too long to get here."
"This," I a
"It'll be daytime. Any sanguine is going to be torpid and easy to kill. Anything else is likely to be torpid as well." She yawned.
My shoulders were tight as bridge cables. "No, Kat. That's final."
A charged silence settled into the room, made itself comfortable, and cringed away from Kat's soft, inflexible tone.
"If I hear the words 'that's final' out of your mouth again, Mitchell Black, they will be." The sheets rasped as she shifted, irritably. "I didn't marry you so you could tell me what to do. I'm an adult, and I'm a Knight of the Argentum Astrum. You can either help me or you can drive that Jeep of yours back to Las Vegas and find yourself both a divorce and a nice little husky to have puppies with."
I don't think she meant to say that. The nausea under my sternum crested, I swallowed sourness. Christ, don't fight with her. It's still your goddamn honeymoon. "I don't want you getting hurt, Kat."
She sighed. "We've done all right so far. And I'll call the Argentum tomorrow morning, as soon as I get up."
I didn't have breath to agree or disagree, my stomach rolling like a ship during a hurricane. I'd've suspected some bad bacon, but any Sunru
SOMETHING WAS WRONG, I SMELLED DIRT AND FOULNESS, and there was something in my eyes. It reeked of death. A scattering of something heavy dripped across my face, wet and silken and laden with decay. Everything was black.
Where's Kat?
Smells. Wet dirt, decaying vegetables, a heavy cologne touching off a chain of association. All my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all. Something heavy across my legs, my fingers tensed, dirt crumbling wet against my nails.
Kat? I didn't smell her.
The men burying me couldn't have been prepared for the dead body to crackle with shifting bones, sprouting fur and moving in ways their entire experience of reality tells them can't be so. They screamed, one teenage voice breaking with fear and another deeper male tone adding a jangling harmony, as I woke in the flush of the metabolic burn fueling the change. Halfway there I realized what was happening, but it was too late. I'd already killed the boy and was on top of the older man, snarling meat-laden breath into his face, my muzzle spattered with hot blood.
Blood's dangerous when you're in between man and wolf. It can drive you right over the edge into crazy. The wolf knows blood but it takes second place to survival, and a real man won't let his blood-lust carry him too far. But halfway? Well, that's the danger zone.
The night breathed, a complex tapestry of scent. Not cold pavement and garbage like a city, but fragrant rotting woodland full of swamp heat and decaying vegetable matter. We were out in the woods, and they had been burying me in a shallow grave. I could still feel tree roots digging into my flesh.
What the hell? I tried to talk, forgetting about my mouthful of wrongly-shaped teeth and tongue. The noises I made weren't human.
Neither were the noises my captive made. His baseball cap had been knocked off, and he was partly bald, smelling of beer and Lucky Strikes. I'd torn his overalls, slashing with long amber claws.
I finally got my wits about me and slowly shifted back, fur melting away. It was damn hot, and I was in a pair of jeans and nothing else. My knees dug into wet earth. The most pertinent question came tumbling out. "Where is my wife?"
The man gibbered and choked with fear, his glands opening up and pouring chemical terror into the meat. Dammit. Nothing sensible would come out of him for a while.
I decided to try to calm him down. "Hey. Why are you trying to bury me?"
Poison, you jackass. And you lapped it up. I've never been the quickest on the uptake, I leave that to Kat. I settle for being the most thorough, most of the time. My fingers tingled and my chest constricted, something foreign burning off through my metabolism and sending a wave of weakness through me. Good thing about being Sunru