She got off the bed, located the leggings and sweatshirt, and began pulling them back on.
I dressed and watched her, thinking about the skinwalker still out there in the mountains, but eventually decided to let her have this one. I could go another hour in this form at most, not enough time to go to the market and back without risking a meat-section wolf-out we definitely didn’t need.
She slipped on a pair of Dana’s shoes by the door and grabbed a couple of reusable grocery bags from the coat rack.
“I’ll be back with food.”
I nodded, watching her close the door.
CHAPTER 6
Katie
The market was two blocks north, exactly where Silas said it would be.
It was a co-op, the kind of place that sold twelve varieties of bulk quinoa and had a bulletin board near the entrance completely papered in flyers for sound bath sessions and lost cats and a woman named Celestine offering past-life regression therapy for forty dollars an hour. The automatic doors slid open and I walked in with Dana’s reusable bags and a grumbling stomach.
I thought about what to get. Some basics would probably be good: eggs, bread, maybe something green. Coffee, because Silas had mentioned an espresso machine at his cabin and that detail had burrowed into my brain despite everything else competing for space there.
As I pushed the cart down the produce aisle, definitely not reminiscing about the way he’d called me mate as I came for him, I could feel my face flushing as if I were over his knee again.
Avocados. I needed avocados. I checked three of them with my thumb the way Dana had taught me and found two acceptable ones.
You’re a shifter. A she-wolf.
Every hike where I’d smelled rain from fifty miles out. Every person I’d instinctively avoided before I had any reason to. The feeling I’d had in the Sandias, directional and specific, pointing at something in the trees. That hadn’t been anxiety. That had been her. My wolf.
I put the avocados in the cart and moved toward the bread aisle.
The market was quiet at this hour. A woman in yoga pants squeezed past me with a basket full of oat milk. A man in a fleece considered a wall of nut butters like it was a stock investment. The lights buzzed steadily overhead, the cooler cases hummed along the back wall, and the whole place smelled of floor wax and fresh basil.
It felt so… ordinary… here. Blessedly, aggressively ordinary.
I stood in front of the bread and thought about how I was going to fit law school into a life that now apparently included demon-beasts with a specific interest in my reproductive capabilities, a wolfman who had fucked and spanked me, and whatever otherDracula Goes to Hawkins, Indianashit I was going to find out about next week.
The argument I’d been building in Dana’s apartment had been reasonable. It was still reasonable. I had a life. I was eighteen months from a JD and I had not accumulated that much student debt in order to go live in a mountain cabin and run into trees in wolf form while I learned to use my supernatural depth perception.
I had people. Mark had been one of them, and Mark was dead, which was something I had not yet fully processed because every time I got close to it something else happened that required immediate survival attention, but the grief was there, a heavy weight underneath everything else.
The bread blurred slightly.
I blinked, put a sourdough loaf in the cart, and moved on.
The whole coffee bean section was a wall of glass jars with little placard descriptions that used words liketerroirandbright citrus notes, and I stood there reading them without retaining any of it. I grabbed a bag of dark roast at random and put it in the cart.
The dairy aisle was cold. I stood in front of the egg case and let the refrigerated air cool my face and remembered the most disturbing thing he’d told me.
If it mates with you, you won’t survive.
He’d flinched from talking about the creature. He’d held human form despite great physical pain to stay at my bedside, but telling the truth about what was after me had stopped him cold.
I took the eggs and put them in the cart.
The produce section looped back around near the entrance, and I slowed in front of the herb display to avoid having to make any decisions while the argument in my head ran its course.
I should go back. I’d promised I would go back.
I was almost at the register when I passed the rack of free newspapers near the door and my eye caught the headline on the bottom half of the front page.
