“I already said, I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Hmmm. There’s Rick LaFleur. He stands around with his tongue hanging out whenever you’re around.” I sighed and Molly shook her head, vexed, starting the van. “Take care, Big-Cat.”
She was pulling away before I realized that she hadn’t asked me to the house for dinner. No invitations to visit with her there had been forthcoming at all, and I didn’t think it was because of my schedule. It was because her husband no longer trusted me to keep Molly safe. And he had good reason.
CHAPTER THREE
You Fight Dirty
I straddled the long seat, turned the key starting Fang, and waved to Molly taking off in her minivan. I eased the bike along the road in the opposite direction and stopped in the middle of the bridge where the wolves attacked Itty Bitty. The water was up, several feet higher than last night, the power company having opened the dam to make power and provide water for the businesses that depend on the releases. Evidence not collected overnight, or missed before the water release, had been washed away. A commercial raft rounded the bend in the river, the occupants wet and laughing. Kayakers played in eddies and small currents. Remembering Itty Bitty and her beau, I found my phone and texted Bruiser and Leo a request for someone to get up here pronto and heal the injured, before the were-taint turned them furry. That would go a long way to making the locals more vamp-friendly. Satisfied I had done all I could for the injured, I gunned the bike.
On the far side of the river, I followed my nose, tasting grindy on the breeze. The scent seemed to be part of the air currents falling from Stirling Mountain. No big surprise there, yet my heart started to pound. The grindy-scent worried me. Gunning the bike, I passed in front of the RV camp and up the mountain along back roads. Not long after, I headed sharply uphill, crossing the state line back into North Carolina.
The peak of Stirling Mountain is nearly six thousand feet high with a metal fire tower on top, but I wasn’t planning on hiking all the way up. I would be stopping at the national park to check out a theory and talk to a guy I had been avoiding—pretty boy Rick LaFleur, the boyfriend-who-wasn’t, that Molly had mentioned. This little side trip was why I had taken the bike instead of asking one of the twins to fly me in Grégoire’s helicopter. Well, that and the fact that Beast had flatly refused to fly in the metal contraption.
The climbing ride to the park was beautiful; Big Creek—its massive boulders scored by grindy markings and rank with grindy scent—on one side of the road was dried to a trickle this time of year unless a heavy rain hit. Then the hair-head, adrenaline-junkie kayakers would be all over the place, taking the steep, highly dangerous creeking-run through its rocks, trees, and boulders. All around me on the climb were farmhouses on small farms, fallow land, horses, cattle, and harvested fields, some with big round hay bales on the peripheries. Wildflowers were everywhere. If I had been riding a quieter machine, I might have seen deer, turkey, even bear this time of year. But it wasn’t likely, not riding Fang. Harleys weren’t built for stealth.
I made the park entrance, taking the narrow gravel road that had been cut from the side of the mountain. It was steep on both sides, one side straight uphill, the other down, sharply, to the boulders of Big Creek. I passed through the horse area with its special camping sites and hitching posts, the distinct scent of horse and manure heavy on the cooling air.
The day-camp parking was full of cars, but I maneuvered on through, undergrowth and trees dense on both sides, to the campground. I left Fang in the bathhouse parking area. The air was twenty degrees cooler here, fresh and damp and rich with scent. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. The weak bouquet of wild orchids that bloomed in August was faint on the breeze. Stronger were the odors of flowering bee balm, mountain mint, milkweed, and crushed jewelweed, the musky scent of rich soil and the smell of verdant green ferns and moss. Pungent and gamey were raccoon, squirrel, opossum, with dozens of bird varieties, and the horses. Faintly, from far off, came deer and bear scent. Overriding it all was the stench of man—the showers, park toilets, the tang of beer, food, charcoal, and seared meat from last night. It wasn’t the smells of The People, the Cherokee of my distant memory, but it was reminiscent.
And over it all rode three of the scents I’d come looking for. One was the grindy, letting me know my theory had been right. Crap. Why’d I have to be right this time? The other scents didn’t belong in these hills, not ever. They had the under-tang of foreign lands, of jungle, rushing violent rivers, and darkest, most remote Africa. Big-cat smell, feral, fierce, ferocious. Alien.
I opened my eyes and tracked that scent across the parking area and higher up the mountain. Moss-covered trees rose above me. Moss-covered ground muffled my boot steps. I hadn’t been here recently, but I knew where I was going. The scents told me.
Despite the slight chill, I slipped out of my leather jacket and hung it by one finger over my shoulder, following the stink of big-cat. I wasn’t armed, not during the day in a national park, no matter that I was licensed to carry concealed. Sometimes it wasn’t smart to taunt law enforcement officials, especially when a mauling had taken place last night.
I followed the scent up a trail, cool and dark beneath the shade of trees, through the acreage set aside for rough, dry camping. Tents dotted the greenery like upside-down flowers in rainbow colors. I took the path higher still, my breath coming harder as the grade increased, to a tent far back from the others. It was close to a runnel of water that emptied into Big Creek, and the tent had been in place for several weeks, grass beginning to grow up at the tent sides. The smell of grindy was strong here. So was the smell of black were-leopard. Kemnebi.
Kem-cat’s wife was dead at the claws of her pet grindylow because she fell in love with Rick LaFleur and tried to turn him into a black were-leopard, like her. Spreading were-taint broke were-law, and killing Safia had fulfilled the grindy’s primary function—protecting humans. Kem was taking it out on Safia’s lover boy. My boyfriend. Ex. Whatever. Rick’s scent still carried some of the wolf-taint too. He’d suffered—been tortured by werewolves—because I hadn’t figured out he was in trouble. I didn’t know if I loved him, but I knew that I owed him.
“Hello the tent,” I said softly.
“I heard when you bring that machine into the park,” a cultured, accented voice said.
I followed the dulcet tones to the back of the tent where a woven, dark green hammock hung between two trees, a long, lean man lazing in it. One leg was draped over the side, bare foot and calf dangling. A matching arm, equally naked, held a bottle of beer. The body between the two was hidden by hammock, and hammock and beer were banned in the park, hence the positioning of them behind the tent. I grinned, skipping the niceties. “You are dressed, aren’t you?”
He toasted me with the beer and wiggled his toes at me in a drunken wave, which didn’t answer my question. The dark skin of both limbs was smooth and unscarred, the flesh of a shape-changer, forever untouched by damage, remade with every shift. Given a few more hundred shifts, my own skin would be as perfect again, assuming I stayed out of mortal danger. For reasons I didn’t know, scars from a lethal wound were hard to heal. “Jane Yellowrock, Rogue Hunter,” he said. “My alpha.” I had made Kem my beta, forced him to bring Rick here, and care for him until he shifted into his big-cat. Kem wanted me to understand that he didn’t have to like it. “My alpha, who smells of catamount and Eurasian owl and dog.”
The last was a slur and I let a hint of my grin out. “Kemnebi, of the Party of African Weres, my beta, who smells of black leopard and sweat and very strongly of beer.”
He lifted his hand, the bottle disappearing behind the hammock edge. I heard a slurping sound and the bottle reappeared, now half empty. “Good beer. Samuel Adams makes the most acceptable beer I have yet discovered in America. I have been tasting all of them. Extensively.” He sipped again. “There are more in the cooler.”
“No thanks, I’m driving.” I dropped my jacket, plopped into a folding sling chair, which was far less comfortable than it looked, and lifted the cooler lid anyway. “I’ll take one of these, though.” I opened another Coke and sipped, wondering how much beer it took to keep a shape-shifter drunk. Our metabolisms are fast, and it had to be a lot of beer. With a toe, I lifted the lid of a large, blue recycle pail. It was three-quarters full of broken beer bottles. Yeah. A lot of beer. After a companionable moment of silence I said, “How long ago did the grindy get here?”
“Safia’s pet arrive two week ago.” The words held no inflection, but were carefully, drunkenly enunciated. Interesting.
“It was a long swim, I take it.”
The hammock moved with what may have been a shrug, noncommittal. “He was most unhappy with me at first. But he forgave me.” There was a heavy dose of bitter irony in the words. I wasn’t real sure about the symbiotic relationship between the two races, but it would seem difficult to maintain, when one was always in danger from the other. I didn’t know what to say to that, but Kem was drunkenly loquacious and carried on the conversation without my contribution. “They are like pets until we err. Affectionate . . .” The words trailed off, then picked back up again. “He killed my mate. And then he came beneath my hand for caress. He . . . licked my hand.” He spaced the last words widely, and they were full of venom. “I forced him to leave, yet I still smell him on the wind. He watches.”
I wanted to say I was sorry, but that might have been offensive as well as disingenuous. I had a similar relationship with the vamps. I killed them when they got out of line, much like the grindy did the weres. Of course I didn’t lick Leo’s hand afterward. The thought’s accompanying mental picture made me grin, which I hid behind the Coke as I drank. My sense of humor was gonna get me killed one day. “How is he?” I asked from behind the can, changing the subject.
Kem raised his head at that one, his black eyes wide, showing above the hammock edge, trying to focus in my direction. His face was darker in the shadows beneath the trees, but his eyes were vibrant. “He is alive. He is unchanged. He is frightened about the full moon, which comes again soon. He is lonely. As lonely as I am.”
