“I was too weak to fight when they threw a rope over the beam and used it to drag me up. Itburned.I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t fight, my throat on fire and my chest breaking. I thought I heard barking. And then I thought my heart exploded.” He sighed. “It didn’t. I just passed out. Val and Taavi found me. Val kept me alive. He almost died, but he saved my life.”
I felt a few drops of moisture hit my arms where they wrapped around Elliot’s chest, and I pulled him tighter to me.
“Nobody saved Dad,” he rasped. “Why did someone saveme, but not him?”
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “I wish I did.”
Back on the couch,Elliot had settled with his head on my thigh, blanket pulled up around his body, one hand over my knee. He was so still that I thought he might have fallen asleep, but when I brushed the hair back from his face, his eyes were open, blinking occasionally as he stared without emotion at the last quarter of the football game.
I kept running my fingers through his hair, toying with the white streak stark amid the black. He let out a heavy sigh, the hand on my knee flexing.
“I need to go out,” he said, suddenly, then sat up, pulling off his shirt.
“Out where?” I asked, startled.
“Out.”
He wanted to shift. “It’s dark and cold.”
“I can see fine and I have a lot of fur,” he replied, standing up and stripping off his jeans.
“El—”
“Come with me,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was trying to forestall my argument, or if he really wanted me to come along. I studied him, trying to figure out the answer. “Please,” he said.
I sighed. Better I went with him, anyway, even if I didn’t want to. “Okay,” I agreed, although I knew I was going to pay for it later.
Naked, he stretched once, and I swallowed, unable to keep from appreciating the muscular lines of his chest and hips and thighs. And then he shifted, his body rippling as skin gave way to fur and bones reshaped themselves, dropping him first to inhuman knees, then to all fours as he shook his head and cracked his jaw with its now much-sharper teeth.
I took off my own clothes, then followed suit.
It still hurt, quite a bit, actually, especially since I’d already abused my knees a lot over the previous week. But I wasn’t going to complain. Not today. I blinked a few times to push the disposable lenses off my eyes, which were now totally the wrong shape for them, and followed the grey-brown blur that was Elliot to the back door.
He grabbed the door’s rope with his teeth, pulled it open, and shuffled out into the night.
I followed, using the outside rope to pull it back closed, and hoped this wasn’t going to be as stupid an idea as I was afraid it would be.
I smelled it first—theparticular stench that signaled death. We’d run across the Cranes’ property, out into the woods so Elliot could dig himself silly while I sat there trying to alternate which front paw was on the ground getting cold, waiting for him to finish what he needed to do.
We’d run back, the blood circulating warmth back into my cold feet, but I skidded to a stop before we hit the edge of the woods on the far side of the back yard and that particular scent hit my nose.
Elliot stopped beside me, lifting his striped head to give me a quizzical look.
I couldn’t explain, not without a mouth that could speak, but I sniffed again, deliberately exaggerating the motion.
Elliot mimicked the action, then cocked his head at me. Whatever I was smelling, he wasn’t.
I huffed out a breath, unhappy and worried. The only reason I would be smelling death at the edge of the yard is if there was something deadinthe yard, and there hadn’t been the several hours ago when we’d left it.
Which likely meant that someone had left whatever it was in the last few hours.
And thatsomeonewas almost certainly the same someone who had left two other dead animals on Elliot’s property.
Although I wasn’t consciously thinking about doing it, I could feel the fur on my neck and back rising, my upper lip curling back from my teeth and a low growl slithering its way out of the back of my throat. Beside me, Elliot pressed closer to my side, the tension in my body making him nervous, even if he didn’t know why.
We approached the house slowly, and I felt the minute Elliot smelled it, too—he tensed, a low, gravely growl coming from his chest.
I stopped first, bending to sniff at a footprint in the slowly freezing mud. I could smell salt, beer, urine, and stale tobacco. Could have been any bar in Shawano. Or bowling alley. Maybe a few basements, too. During prohibition people had put bars in their own houses and invited their neighbors rather than risk the speakeasies in places like Green Bay.
