He bounded over and nudged the phone out of my hand with his nose. It fell to the floor with a thunk, and he stepped on it. Not hard enough to break it, just enough to assert claim to it.
“That’s mine,” I insisted in my bestYou and Your Pup, How to Set Boundariesvoice.
I took a breath and stared at the wolf.
The wolf stared back at me. His paw didn’t move.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll just sit here and stare at the wall then. That’s a great use of my time.”
It was time for a new approach. It was time to be sad.
After several minutes of over-the-top sad girl eyes, the wolf seemed to relent. With a skeptical snort, he removed his paw from my phone and allowed me to pick it up from the floor.
I typedskinwalkerinto the browser, the wolf giving me a healthy dose of side-eye as I did so. The results were not reassuring. Articles about Navajo legends of malevolentsupernatural beings that could take the form of animals or humans, just as the wolfman had told me.
I was so absorbed in my doomscrolling that I didn’t notice movement until a large cold nose pressed firmly against the back of my hand.
I yelped. The phone hit the mattress.
The wolf looked at me without apology. Apparently he felt he’d given me plenty of time.
I didn’t expect the sad girl eyes to work again, but I tried them anyway. They didn’t.
He left around what I estimated was mid-morning, presumably going off “hunting” again, whatever that meant. He probably had a whole harem of girls he routinely scared the fuck out of before being like “Sorry, have to be a wolf now, byyeeee!!”
I counted to sixty.
Then I got up and tried pulling off the boards barring the cabin door. They were on too fucking tight, though, so I decided it was time to figure out how this asshole was getting in and out of here. I found the storm cellar five minutes later and was out his littleHardy Boys Adventurestrapdoor with my phone in hand two minutes after that.
The day was clear and cool, with that flat, bright quality of a New Mexico morning before the heat had built. The trees around the property smelled clean and skinwalker-free. I stood in the dirt lot and breathed it in, letting it steady me.
Walking away from the cabin, I had a frank internal conversation with myself.
The rational argument for returning to the cabin:there was genuinely something out there that had killed Mark, and I had personally been hunted by it thrice now. The wolfman (manwolf?) had been protecting me, at significant physical cost, for over a week. He had carried me away from a threat. He had been correct so far about everything I’d been able to verify.
The (less) rational argument against staying in the cabin:I was a grown-ass adult woman who had been fucked by a smoking hot werewolf, but that didn’t mean he had any business leaving me sitting in a boarded-up cabin and expecting me to stay there just because some grandma-eating motherfucker told me to. Also he’d knocked my phone on the floor.
I caught a city bus several blocks from the property, paid the fare with coins I found in the sweatpants pocket, and sat in the back, thinking.
I couldn’t just waltz up to my apartment. That much was obvious. Even operating under the leastX-Filespossible interpretation of the last week’s events, there was a dead man whose killer hadn’t been found and I’d just broken out of a hospital like a crazy person.
The bus route swung south, then east, and I rode it while I thought. The city moved past the windows, ordinary and sunbaked. A man got on at Central with a grocery bag. A woman with two children sat three rows ahead of me. Everything was so relentlessly, peacefully mundane that the events of the past week seemed like a dream generated by someone else’s subconscious.
But it wasn’t a dream. I was alive, awake, and not on drugs, and I was wearing a man’s sweatpants because he’d turned into a wolf and then run off.
I opened my phone and pulled up the map.
My apartment was in the north part of downtown, a cluster of adobe complexes with courtyard parking and the perpetual smell of green chili from the restaurant across the street. I could approach from the park to the south and see the building without going within two blocks of it. If nothing seemed wrong, I could retrieve some clothes and my backup debit card and figure out a next step that didn’t involve waiting for a wolf to come home and finish his fucking sentence.
That plan lasted until I saw the three black SUVs, two marked police cruisers, and a van with federal plates in the parking lot of my complex. Two people in FBI windbreakers were visible near the front entrance, and there was a folding table set up under the portico with what looked like a command center set up around it. As I watched from behind a cottonwood, a uniformed officer emerged from the building’s front entrance and walked directly toward a man in a dark blazer, gesturing at a tablet he was carrying.
The feds really were looking for me. I allowed myself a moment to feel like a badass.
Then I stood behind the tree for a solid minute or two and seriously considered turning myself in. I had nothing to hide. I hadn’t done anything illegal. They would assume I had panicked due to the aftereffects of the head injury and fled. I could work with that. I wouldn’t even have to mention being manwolfed good and hard.
Except…
Except I didn’t know if I could trust them. I hadn’t known if I could trust the hospital staff, and that instinct had been correct.I didn’t know if the thing could impersonate someone in a federal windbreaker as easily as it had impersonated a night-shift nurse, but I couldn’t see an obvious reason why not. I didn’t know anything about it, really, and standing in the park behind a tree in borrowed sweatpants was not going to improve my information situation.
