It was just what they’d been able to find of Bell on the road.
The bits that hadn’t blown away or been caught up in roadkill on a truck’s tires.
Every breath that Ledger took tasted like rotten, salted whale. He knew he should be able to deal with this, that his job had seen him roll with worse than a dead dog. Except right here, right now, he wasn’t the man who could say all that. He was a fifteen-year-old kid who’d never faced Bell down and called him what he was.
The thing staggered to a stop a few feet in front of him. It worked its broken muzzle from one side to the other. Bits of broken teeth spilled out onto the road. The raw, dry wound where a port had been plugged into Bell’s chest for his drugs was there, as well as the slice in his flaccid gut where the colostomy bag had hung.
“We made… a deal,” Earl choked out of the thing’s mouth. It scratched at the twisted knot of vertebra and skin at the base of its tail with nubby, almost human fingers. “Now you… ask for help. This is… a debt.”
That helped. It wasn’t Bell’s voice or his words. This was just contract negotiations. Ledger knew how to do that. He didn’t even need to think past the fear digging into his brain. Bargaining was autopilot.
“I didn’t ask you,” he said.
Earl tried to lick its lips, but its tongue was too short for its muzzle. “You asked… my thing,” it said. “It asked… me. Debt.”
Ledger hesitated.
That was stupid. He was in too deep to even play at chivalry, especially for a man he’d only just met. The correction still stuck in his throat… and if he pulled this off and found what Earl wanted, then Earl would be dead. The debt would never be called in.
And if he failed? If he didn’t find Earl’s death, he’d have no bones, and it would be hard to get much worse at that point.
Earl called Wren a “thing.”
Maybe he was. Wren was the first to point out he wasn’t human. That wasn’t the point, though.
“He didn’t—” Wren started to speak.
Ledger reached back and grabbed Wren’s hand. He squeezed it hard, his nails digging into Wren’s palm so that Wren broke off mid-sentence with a startled “fuck.”
“Measure for measure,” Ledger said. “I’ll owe you a debt proportionate to what you offer.”
Earl narrowed its eyes. The seed-pearl clusters of bug eggs along its eyelids were dislodged and rolled down its face. “Debt… is… what I say… it is.”
“No,” Ledger said.
He still had hold of Wren’s hand, and he felt the warning squeeze of the other man’s fingers. It was kind but unnecessary. Ledger could see that Earl didn’t like to be talked back to. It recoiled and staggered back a step on bony half-paws as it nearly lost its balance. Then it came forward with unexpected, horrific speed and was in Ledger’s face before he could think to run.
On some level, he could feel the bite of terror that should have been his reaction to Bell’s malformed face as it half bulged out of a rotted coyote’s skull. It was buried, however, under Ledger’s choking revulsion at the stink of the thing. The overwhelming smell of salt had an almost physical weight. He couldn’t just taste it—sharp and gritty on his tongue—he could feel it parch his eyeballs and wither his skin.
“What?” Earl choked out. The throat he had to use to speak managed to drag up some ghost of a growl. “Did you… say?”
“No,” Ledger said. “I don’t take that deal.”
One of the egg sacs dropped out of Earl’s eye and onto Ledger’s arm. If he’d had any moisture in his mouth, he would have screamed. As it was, he just shuddered and tried to hold his ground.
“You can’t… refuse… me.”
“I didn’t ask you to raise Bell,” Ledger said. “I asked to know what he knew. If I don’t ask, you’ve given me nothing.”
The blunt human tongue poked around the wet, broken inside of the coyote’s mouth again. Then Earl peeled dead, splitting lips back from unmatched teeth in what might have been a smile or a snarl. Ledger held his breath as he waited to find out which.
“I could… keep this,” Earl said raggedly. It poked at its face with stubby fingers. “He… Bell… is in here. A little… ghost in the marrow. His pain is… unbelievable. It will be… until… I let him go.”
Ledger guessed it was a smile. He breathed out unsteadily and shrugged. “Sucks to be him,” he said. Earl looked genuinely confused, so Ledger shrugged and laid it out. “Bloodlines don’t mean what they used to.”
Earl heaved an aggrieved sigh. Its breath was what Ledger would call unbelievable.
“Measure for measure,” it grudgingly agreed. “Proportionate… and paid. That’s… done. Your turn.”
