I stood and brushed off my hands again, looking from the street back to the river and the bridge, envisioning the wolves waiting in the tall brush just downstream of the bridge, slinking into the water in the dark, attacking the young woman, Itty Bitty. The wolves dragging her—bleeding profusely, terrified, screaming—to shore and deliberately infecting her with the were-taint. In my mind’s eye, I saw her boyfriend leaping from his kayak, seeing indistinct shapes swarming in the night, hearing her cries, rushing in, swinging a sharp-bladed paddle, only to have the wolves turn on him, savaging him for interfering. Other predawn paddlers coming fast. The weres slipping away in the ruckus. Anger burned under my breastbone. This had happened because of me. The wolves were here because of my actions and decisions. My advice. My plans. Crap.
“The victims are both going to go furry at the next full moon, aren’t they?” Mike said. After the decades of shouting to be heard over rushing whitewater, the guy had a voice with little volume control, but this time, his words were muted with worry.
“Maybe not,” I said. “I have a few contacts with the vamps. They have some healers.”
Emmett snorted, not impressed with vamp healers. He muttered under his breath something insulting about suckheads, weres, and witches in his county. I glanced at Molly, an earth witch, who ignored him, so I ignored the comment too, thinking instead about the logistics of getting a Mercy Blade here to heal the injured couple. I didn’t know if there was a Mercy Blade in North Carolina or Tennessee, but I’d find one somewhere. I turned my attention to other logistics.
“How far”—I paused, uncertain, trying to recall the distance from a long-ago vacation—“is it from here to the Mississippi River?” The last time I saw a grindylow was on a bayou that emptied into the Mississippi, west of New
Orleans. And New Orleans was the birthplace of everything that had happened to me for the last six months, most of it bad. I wanted to know how the green-skinned, semiaquatic grindy got from there to here. Sure as heck not on a Harley.
“It’s four hundred miles from Knoxville to Memphis,” Dave said, his voice raspy and soft, in contrast to Mike’s booming volume. Memphis was a Mississippi port city, and the most direct route overland to the river, but the water-loving grindy hadn’t taken an overland route.
I indicated a group of playboat kayakers coasting in after a run on the Upper Pigeon. The small, human-teenager-sized grindy would likely need as much water as a playboat. “Is it possible to paddle from the Mississippi to here, if you only count water big enough to handle something that size, and you prefer cold water, rocks, and privacy?” I looked around at the numbers of boaters. “Usually.”
The guides both looked northwest, downstream. Dave squinted, shading his blue eyes with a hand, and said, “If you can jump dams and paddle a lot of miles of waterway, all upstream,” he paused to draw in air, and my eyes slid to the scars on his throat. They looked like the result of a down and dirty tracheotomy, though I’d never asked how he came by them. “Then yes. The Pigeon goes west to Knoxville, eventually joins into the French Broad and heads south into northern Alabama. It empties into the Tennessee River, which empties into the Miss.”
Mike added, “I know people who’ve paddled the distance downstream, but it’s a hell of a long paddle even moving with the current. I don’t know anyone who’s paddled it upstream.”
I didn’t know what the grindy’s speed was, or if it could handle long distances, or upstream currents. Which might mean that the grindy had hitched a ride on boats, making it a once-mythical supernat who was comfy with modern transportation. I smiled sourly. I didn’t know much about grindys, and had been hoping to keep it that way. But the grindy wasn’t my problem. The wolves were.
I looked up and out, seeing the gorge where the rafting businesses were nestled in the little town of Hartford, Tennessee. Just in visual distance, there were thousands of square acres where wolves could run and hunt and never be seen by a human. If I was wolf-hunting in Beast form, it would take a long time to cover this much territory. Wolves liked to run long distances. Beast wasn’t fond of it, wasn’t built for it, and even with humans in danger, she would fight me every step of the way. Beast is not dog, she murmured into my mind, sounding sleepy. Do not hunt nose to ground. I scowled and walked from the water, its tinkling quickly muted by the sound of nearby Interstate 40, back toward Fang.
The wind changed and I caught a scent of wolf away from the water. On the far side of the road, something gleamed in the bright sun. Silver-tipped wood. It was mine. I sometimes lost stakes in the heat of battle, easy for an enemy to take. I bent and picked up the sterling-silver-tipped ash-wood stake.
Deep inside, my Beast hissed with displeasure and showed killing teeth. The wolves had left me a personal message and challenge. I looked around. No one except Molly had seen me pick up the stake. She watched with a quizzical expression as I sniffed along its length, smelling wolf, sweat, and motor oil, something spicy like Mexican food, and cheap liquor. No help here. No scent-clue jumping out and saying, “The wolves stayed there, in that hotel, in that town, last night.” Giving her a small shrug, I tucked the stake into a belt loop.
Boots crunching on gravel, I walked back to the parking lot of Rapid Expeditions, the mom-and-pop rafting and kayak business owned by Dave Crawford. Molly and I sat on the old church bench in front of the shop and accepted Cokes from Dave, pulled from an icy cooler. Molly sipped delicately, tucking a strand of bright red hair behind an ear. She’d always been a lady, contrasting to my motorcycle mama image. I popped the top and drank deeply before rolling the can over my forehead for the chill. It was hot for September. Global climate change and all that.
Dave lounged in the middle of the church bench, propping one bare foot on the old wood. He was lithe as a snake, solid muscle, and bare-chested in the heat, water-wicking pants hanging from hips to knees, exposing more surgical scars. His dog, Josie, leaped up and curled beside him, her eyes on me and her ears back. The mutt was gentle and sweet, but she didn’t like the way I smelled and wanted to make sure I knew it.
Mike pulled hard on his Coke, standing in the sun with one fist on a hip, looking around as if expecting the wolves to reappear any moment. “You want to see the other sites?” he asked, gesturing to the river behind the shop. “I can take you down anything that’ll take a two-man raft or ducky. If you paddle, Dave can get you into any tight areas in a hard boat.” He pronounced it as if it were one word, hardboat.
I wasn’t familiar with the lingo, but hard boats sounded like kayaks. And no way was I strapping myself into a kayak and bouncing down a mountain creek. Beast hacked softly, stressing her opposition to the activity. And then I actually heard the question. “Other sites?”
“Places where that thing made the three scratches.”
I stopped, the Coke can still on my head, and let a smile form. If a grindylow was marking territory, then it was likely leaving scratches where it smelled weres, tracking them to take them down. Justice among weres was quick and final. The grindy could do my work for me. I lowered the can and drank, finishing it off. “To start, can you put out the word to the locals,” I said. “I need a map of all the places where people have seen the grindy’s scratch marks. Kayakers, rafters, hikers, park rangers, anybody who’s seen anything. If we can get a decent count and locations, we can determine the perimeters of the grindy’s territory, and maybe pinpoint the center of it. I can start my search for the werewolves there. I can pay you for your time.”
Money talks. Dave and Mike met eyes and nodded. “Yeah, we can do that.” Mike stuck out his hand and I took it for a firm shake. Shouting for the river guides he managed at the competing rafting business, Mike branched off toward the Bean Trees Café, demanding maps, GPS coordinates, beer, and PowerPoint displays, leaving Dave, Molly, and me sitting in the shade. I looked over at Emmett, who was waving in another deputy driving a marked car. This place was going to be a circus again tonight.
Dave turned his intense blue eyes to me and focused on my scars, the visible ones on my throat, and the ones on my left arm that hadn’t yet disappeared. Mine were vamp-fang and werewolf-bite scars. “How dangerous are they?” he asked.
“The grindy? Not much, unless you’re a were who hurt a human; then you get to die, as soon as he can catch you. The wolves?” I lifted my arm to display the scarring around my elbow. “You ever think about taking on a full-grown mountain lion? Bare-handed?” When he shook his head, an almost-grin on his lips, I said, “Well, two wolves will take on a big-cat. And sometimes win.” Beast growled low in my mind, not disagreeing. “They have claws hard enough to rip skin and jaws that can crush a human skull or take out a human throat with one swipe. Werewolves are worse.”
He pointed to my throat. “Is that where you got those scars?”
“No. Vamps did that.”
His eyes widened and a small smile played on his lips. “And you still work for them?”
Molly snorted. “She never was too bright.”
I shrugged. What could I say? It was true. I followed Mol to her newish van, and leaned in the open window. “Thanks for coming,” I said. “I wasn’t sure if we’d need your healing talents.”
“I’m always happy to help,” she said, arranging her belongings in the passenger seat. “It was interesting. I like watching you work when you’re not staking vamps and trying to save people from them.” Together, we had gone up against vamps before, and not everyone made it back alive, but I’d saved her children, Angie Baby and Little Evan, and her sister and baby the year before that, before I left the mountains for New Orleans. I gave her a wry half smile.
Molly patted my arms on the window. “I need to get home. Big Evan wasn’t happy about me getting involved with this.”
“Yeah. I know. I really appreciate it. Breakfast at the café soon?”
“Almost every morning. I’m always there after I drop Angie off to school. Which still feels strange. She’s growing up so fast.” She shook her head at the passage of time. “My sisters know you’re back in town and ask after you every morning. They want to see you.” I didn’t make friends easily and knowing that Molly’s family had all but adopted me after I helped to save the pregnant Carmen from a young rogue-vamp made me feel all sappy inside. Her eyes twinkled at me. “You could bring a boyfriend.”