This is Ranger Yazzie. If you get this, please call me. I’ll be happy to listen.
She must have gotten my number from the school or my apartment complex or maybe a friend or neighbor or some government database or other. Points for putting in the extra effort of texting me on the off chance I ended up with my phone back in my possession, but I hadn’t busted out of the hospital just to call somebody who would inevitably end up dragging me back there.
I could call someone else, though. Maybe my friend Dana, who was in Barcelona for six weeks. We’d had coffee before she left and she’d pressed her spare key into my hand and said, the plant needs water every ten days and if you want to use the Netflix, the password is PaellaSucks69. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me crashing at her place… or hiding out from mythical creatures there.
Or I could call the same officer who’d interviewed me at the hospital and explain that I’d escaped from said hospital, beencarried through a city by a naked man, had sex with him, and oh, by the way, he turned into a wolf. That would go over brilliantly.
I opened my contacts and was scrolling for Dana’s number when I heard a growl.
I looked up.
The wolf was standing in the open door of the bedroom, watching me with those amber eyes locked on the phone in my hand.
“I found it in the nightstand,” I said, in the reasonable tone of a person explaining something perfectly innocent. “It was just sitting there.”I thought you were off hunting, asshole.
The wolf let out a low growl as if he’d heard the last bit along with the rest.
“I’m not calling anyone. I was just checking my messages.”
The growl deepened.
“You can’t growl at me for using my own phone.”
He took one step into the room. The floorboards registered his weight.
I put the phone on the nightstand. “Fine. I’m putting it down. See? Down. Very down.”
The sound stopped. The wolf turned and padded back to its position by the door. It lay down, facing outward, ears rotating like small radar dishes.
I sat on the bed with my arms crossed and tried to think.
The thing was, I didn’t entirelynotbelieve him. The creature in the ravine had been real. Mark’s impersonation had been real. The nurse in the hospital room had been real in the same horrifying way that Mark had been real, down to the same charred-sage smell, the same borrowed assembly of human features. Something was out there. Something that had killed my friend, worn his face, and walked me into those mountains. That much was not up for debate.
But was it hunting me specifically? For the reason he’d described?
If it mates with you, you won’t survive. Its offspring would?—
The rest of that sentence must have been bad.
I wanted an explanation, a full one, start to finish, without anyone’s skeleton inconveniently rearranging itself in the middle.
The wolf who just growled at me didn’t look like he was planning to shift into human form and answer questions anytime soon, and I had fifteen percent—now eighteen percent—battery, a phone full of messages from people who thought I was missing or dead, and no real plan.
Stay in the cabin, he’d said.
I looked at the boarded windows. The wolf across the bedroom door, whose ears were now tilted in my direction with the pointed suspicion of a babysitter who had heard the toddler go quiet.
I was supposed to just sit here.
I picked up the phone again.
I’d barely unlocked the screen when the growling resumed. I looked up and the wolf had rotated its head one hundred and eighty degrees without moving the rest of its body, staring at me over its haunches with an expression of absolute inflexibility.
“Look,” I told it. “I have handled my own life for twenty-three years. I have paid my own rent since I was eighteen and maintained a three-point-eight GPA through two years of law school, and I do not need to be managed by a lesser mammal.”
The lesser mammal stared at me.
“I’m going to look up one thing. One informational thing. I’m not calling anyone.”
