Roland sighed. “I’m almost embarrassed to say this but there’s a particular type of candy that my beast adores. If he scents it, he has to shift.”
We’d better stay away from sugar, but Roland explained it was made to a special recipe and his father’s cook made it.
“When I was younger, they’d use it to entice me to shift so they could use the horn to heal someone.”
Hmmm, a unicorn who couldn’t resist a secret recipe. Interesting. It didn’t help us, except if any bad guys came bearing sweet treats, we’d need a getaway plan.
I led Roland to the library entrance and scouted around the street out front. I shaded my eyes and examined the buildings opposite for a sign of anyone at the window. But it was a small town, and the only thing of interest was a dog tied up outside a deli, whining because his owner was buying food inside.
I beckoned Roland out. “If there’s no one following us, they may have been tracking your phone, and as this is the last place they’ll see, we need to get out of town and put as many miles between us and this place as we can.”
“How do we avoid anyone finding us?”
“We’ll need to disguise your scent, and no, not with urine or skunk musk. Garlic, onion, cabbage, and brussel sprouts will change your scent.”
Roland made a face. “They’ll give me gas.”
“Oh no. In that case you can sleep outside.”
9
ROLAND
We needed to get out of this town, and we needed to do it fast.
It hadn’t clicked for me that the phone could be tracked, and now that the possibility was staring me in the face, I knew that we were lucky not to have been found already. Someone in the herd would mention it to my father to get his favor and he’d act on it.
My father had too much on the line with the mating to ignore my departure. And mating aside, he refused to lose face… ever. He’d make an example of me, and my mate would be sucked into that, or worse, once he was discovered to be rogue.
Bryden was looking better, a lot better, but still not great. We could hitchhike again, but standing out there waiting for someone to both stop and agree to take us wasn’t much better than staying exactly where we were.
I went back to the library’s front desk and asked if there were any trains or buses. The train didn’t run through here, the closest station was an hour away, but he gave me a bus schedule. For the middle of seemingly nowhere, there were quite a few options.
The station was close, and the tickets were cheap.
If there had been a place I could safely attempt to shift and heal him again, I would’ve, but there wasn’t. Pretty soon, my healing powers wouldn’t be effective at all for him, not that I was sure I could do much in my current state. I hated feeling helpless.
Bryden agreed with me about the bus, and after grabbing some gas station egg sandwiches, we walked the mile and a half to the station.
“This is intense,” I said, and my mate took my hand.
The bus station smelled like everything, and by everything, I meanteverything. There were people, some shifters, thankfully, no bears or horses that I could discern. There was body odor, animal droppings, human waste, chemicals, food from many cuisines, grease, smoke—all of it slamming into me all at once.
There were too many people.
Too many scents.
I hated it, and had we not needed to be there, I’d have retreated. My mate, holding my hand, gave me the grounding I needed.
I went to the window and got our tickets to the city, paying with cash, grateful that the ticket machine was down because I didn’t have a card to use. We stuck together and kept our heads down, watching everyone who got on the bus, making sure we weren’t getting trapped with the exact people we were trying to avoid.
We didn’t speak, just took it all in. If they showed up here after we left, they’d lose us. The bus was going so many places and stopping so often that they wouldn’t be able to figure out where we landed, not easily anyway. It would break the scent trail, and they’d have to find a new lead.
Despite that, the plan wasn’t perfect. We lived in an era where everything was being recorded at the bus stations and on the bus. And while it wasn’t public access, there were people who’d be able to get to the tapes, and my father did have a ton of connections.
Another concern were other shifters who might get on or off. So far, the people boarding were all human, but that could and probably would change as our journey continued. Just as the bus driver called his thirty-second warning, we got on and grabbed a seat about halfway down the bus, two of the few remaining left.
We stayed on the bus through multiple stops, not getting off, just watching and waiting. The scents were just as bad on the bus as in the station, as the air wasn’t circulating enough. The bathroom on board was filled with more chemicals than I was used to as someone who regularly cleaned up the herdlands. Finally, we arrived at the city, our immediate destination.
