“Are you all right?” Leslie asked when Anna moved around so she could look the FBI agent in the face. “That looked … that sounded like it hurt. We could hear your bones break.”
Anna sneezed and let her tail wag. Katie looked at Anna, and then quickly away again. Her hand over her mouth. “It’s not … it wasn’t…” Her voice stuttered to a stop—and then she made a break for her house.
Anna sighed. Yes. Werewolves are monsters and the change isn’t pretty. Unfair to ask the mundanes to deal with it. She’d had no choice.
“Can you find the fae?” Leslie asked. “I assume the deal is still in effect. If you find him and we can’t communicate, I’ll go back in the house and drag Ms. Jamison back out.”
Yes. Finish this business, thought Anna.
She checked out the big tree first, though it was too obvious. It smelled of fae magic, no question. But to her wolf nose, the whole yard smelled of fae.
She trotted the circumference of the yard and played a little hot and cold with herself to make sure she was right that the fae was somewhere near that big orange tree. The scent of the fae, who did not smell like Chelsea’s house or the day care, faded as soon as she got to the house end of the swimming pool. She quartered the yard around the pool and ended up back by the orange tree.
Not the butterfly bush, not the granite rock that was decorated with small pots of herbs where the sides of the boulder made natural shelves. Not the handful of tea rose bushes. Not the yuccas—which did indeed show signs of being dug up and replaced. Everything smelled of the fae, but not enough. Anna backed away and looked carefully for something she had missed.
Where? she asked herself, asked her wolf spirit. Where is he?
The wolf focused on one of the lemon trees, the smallest and scruffiest of them. Like the yuccas, it looked as though it was suffering from rough handling.
She closed in on it, shut her eyes, and let her nose lead her across the stone walkway and onto the gravel that covered the earth around the plants. Her ears picked up the sound of a door opening in the house, a car pulling up on the street, and Leslie’s heartbeat twenty feet away. Her nose followed the elusive trail until fae was all she could smell.
She opened her eyes—and fear, visceral and unexpected, turned her joints to water and closed her throat so she could neither breathe nor make a sound. Justin stood before her, the werewolf who had Changed her and then made her life a living hell.
And all she could think was, You’re dead. You’re dead. I saw you die.
The text message from Anna was simple. It said: Don’t worry. I need my wolf nose to find a fae. As Charles finished reading, he felt his mate’s shift begin.
She knew him. She was worried that he’d come looking for her if she transformed to wolf, so she was reassuring him that she wasn’t in harm’s way. If she hadn’t added the last bit, he’d have let her text message reassure him.
She was looking for a fae on her own? When the fae they were looking for was powerful and sophisticated enough to create a child from a bundle of sticks? Not without him, she wasn’t.
“Pull over,” he told Marsden, interrupting whatever the agent had been saying about the next place they were headed, had been headed.
“Excuse me?”
Impatient, Charles caught the other man’s eye and said, low-voiced, “Pull over.”
The car swerved out of traffic and came to a halt with a jerk.
“What the freak, man?” said Marsden, staring at his hands as though he couldn’t believe what had happened. That he’d just obeyed orders.
Humans weren’t used to following the hierarchy of the pack, but it still worked on them. At least it worked on them when Charles was giving the orders. It wasn’t magic. But there was a reason Charles was usually the most dominant in his world that was filled with dominant wolves. Even humans had that primitive brain that drill sergeants around the world tapped into, the part of the brain concerned with survival. That part heard an order and just obeyed.
Charles got out and rounded the front of the car rapidly, so the spell of his order didn’t have a chance to fade. He opened the driver’s-side door and said, “Time for me to drive.” When that didn’t move Marsden, he met his eyes again and said, “Get out of the car, Agent Marsden. I’m driving.”
“Jim?” Leeds said.
Marsden unbuckled and got out, too slowly to suit Charles, but it was done. Charles sat down and belted in. While Marsden got into the passenger seat, Charles played with the tablet mounted in the dash of the car until it gave him a map to look at. He hadn’t used this particular version of a tablet before, but there was nothing related to a computer that didn’t eventually spill its secrets to him.
Charles knew Phoenix of twenty years ago, but the new city and its suburbs were much changed. Anna’s pain echoed in his head, shivering shreds that were worse than usual. He felt her wolf’s anxiety, but Anna was okay.
That knowledge gave him the patience to wait until Marsden was beside him, buckled in. Then he hit the gas, crossed four lanes of traffic, and slid sideways through the police emergency road that connected one side of the expressway to the other. There was a car in the nearest lane and the Cantrip agent’s car was undertorqued compared to his truck.
The siren control bar had a switch helpfully marked LIGHTS NO SIREN. He tripped it, crossed the highway in front of the oncoming car, and then pulled into the next lane over, ignoring the sounds his passengers made.
He put his foot down and wished the car had more power on the top end. He drove it a little slower than flat-out because he might need that extra speed to get them out of trouble. Every few minutes he glanced at the map on the tablet. He didn’t know where Anna was, but he could feel her and he headed that direction as quickly as he could.
“I thought you said you couldn’t drive,” said Marsden tightly.
In the backseat, Leeds was chanting fervently, “Not gonna die today, not today, Lord. Not gonna die today, not today, Lord.”
Charles passed a four-car mobile roadblock by squeezing the car down the left-hand shoulder, which wasn’t quite wide enough, and he had to muscle it pretty good to keep the soft sand from pulling them into the ditch. Leeds’s half prayer sped up and got pretty loud until the car was traveling with all four wheels on the blacktop again.
“I prefer not to,” Charles answered Marsden as he switched lanes over and back. “But it is better if I drive when my wolf is on the hunt.” And then he quit talking, quit listening, and drove while his Anna completed her change, and her pain left him clearheaded.