The barn was not huge, as barns went—two stories high, two school buses wide, and three school buses long. He could tell because there was a derelict school bus without windows or wheels on one side of the freshly graveled parking lot for him to use as a measuring stick. The barn’s siding had an odd pockmarked appearance where new, untreated siding boards had been used to replace old or rotting ones.
It was the only structure (other than fences) he’d seen between here and the highway.
Besides the school bus and Asil’s car, there were five other cars and a Suburban, which was hitched to a large cargo trailer parked in the lot. He stared at the Suburban thoughtfully. The pack would come back tomorrow to deal with the cars. They didn’t have a witch, but they did have a friend of the pack who owned a scrapyard.
Since all possible observers were out of sight, Asil allowed himself to limp on the way back to the barn. He paused in front of the new door, braced himself for the scent of blood, death, and cat, then entered, his gait steady and even.
He shut the door behind him and locked out the persistent wind. Above him, there was a creak from the rafters. Barns were noisy places in windstorms. He didn’t bother looking up.
The back two-thirds of the barn was filled with the suppliesof an ongoing remodel mixed with whatever detritus from years past that had not been exorcised when they took the school bus out—including the school bus’s left quarter panel. Three rusty barrels full of broken shovels, rakes, and assorted sicklelike farm implements sat next to a new table saw. The bucket of a decrepit tractor held boxes of flooring stampedHome Depot. All of that lay beyond the see-through plastic dust sheets and the remodeled part of the barn.
The front of the barn had looked like a sultan’s bordello before this afternoon’s battle royal. The pack had taken the blood-soaked cushions and blankets to be burned, and what remained reminded him of a stage, once most of the set pieces had been removed. There were a few chairs, a miscellany of garbage swept into a pile in the middle of the floor, and two very large occupied cages.
“Come to a winter picnic, she said,” Asil told the tiger, who screamed at him from behind thick steel bars. Her earlier frenzy was gone, but he could smell her anger—and her fear of him. “It will be fun, she said.”
The floors were temporary, the kind arenas put over their hockey rinks so they could use the space for concerts. He imagined that they had been brought in, since the rest of the barn had a dirt floor. The flooring surface was marred with deep claw marks and blood.
His feet stuck a bit where the blood was still tacky.
Asil’s stomach growled. Shifting took calories, as did healing. The tiger was the only one who had eaten this afternoon, a meal too long denied her. Today she had gotten a bellyful.
Asil was fond of seeing justice done. He was a little less fondof the tiger, who, upon finishing off most of the humans who had been here, had decided to continue with Asil, who had done her no ill at all.
“Justice,” he told the tiger, though he was pretty sure she didn’t speak English, “doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.”
She focused on him, her mouth open in distressed pants.
“Sometimes it only means the bad guys are stopped.”
He’d stopped the bad guys tonight—well, he and the tiger. And then he’d stopped the tiger. That made two dates, two successful wins for the good guys. Or, at least, the less harmful guys. Asil might have been impressed with the way his anonymous Concerned Friends had deposited him into the middle of situations that needed the intervention of a magnificent hero if he believed that his unknown benefactors had actually planned any of it.
He’d headed out to Great Falls this morning thinking that he was going to meet his date at a restaurant that had resident cats who entertained the guests while they ate. Apparently, there were cat cafés springing up all over the place.
Asil hadn’t thought it was a good idea for a werewolf to attend such a café—cats and werewolves didn’t mix well. But he hadn’t been consulted. He had begun with the assumption that there would be problems with this date.
Admittedly, he’d been expecting the kinds of problems that ended in laughter or a mutual decision not to ever see each other again. And, as usual, he had been right.
“I do not think that my Concerned Friends understand the meaning of the word ‘date,’ ” he mused. “A date should be romantic.”
From the other side of the room, the lioness rumbled.
“The atmosphere?” Asil said, and took a moment to consider.
The interior of the barn was lit by skylights set into the new metal roof. One of the now-dead partyers had told Asil that the owner (also one of the now-dead partyers) intended to make the old barn into an events center. Now that the sun was setting, the shadows were taking over the building.
“Maybe we do have mood lighting,” Asil murmured, looking over his shoulder at the lioness. “But the romantic ambiance is not increased by the scent of blood.” He paused. “Unless one is a vampire.”
It was getting pretty dark, even for a werewolf. After a little searching, Asil found a light switch. Four bare bulbs ten feet up on the front wall of the barn turned on.
Once he’d understood that “picnic” from the emails didn’t mean what he thought it meant and “must love cats” from the dating website meant literally, he’d wondered why they’d scheduled their bacchanalia for midday when orgies traditionally happened at night. Perhaps he was looking at the reason.
Four dim lightbulbs did not illuminate the interior of the barn well enough for human eyes to feel comfortable under predatory gazes. More immediately useful than the lighting situation was the thermostat. He turned it down from eighty to fifty-five.
He looked at the bloodstained floor and said, “I trust that my Concerned Friends take note thatIkilled no one.”
The lioness made a moaning sound, a sound that would have caused any gazelle in the area to freeze in fear.
Asil turned toward her and smiled as he raised both hands in surrender. “Fine. Yes. It was I who released the tiger fromher slavery so she could make all the bodies. But I do not like to take credit for others’ rightful kills. And I kept her from killing my date.” He tilted his head. “There is this dating challenge, you see. I am supposed to keep my date alive.” He paused to consider his words. “I feel that is important.”
