WOMAN SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING IN ALBUQUERQUE ANIMAL ATTACK DEATH
Below the headline was a photo.
Of me.
The article had my name, a physical description, and a number to call with any information.
I set the paper back down on the rack, face down.
They were looking for me.
Obviously they were looking for me. I’d seen the feds outside my building and understood what that meant. But seeing my face on the front page of a newspaper in a grocery store two blocks from where I was currently staying made the reality of it land in a different, more immediate way.
I was a person of interest in Mark’s death.
Mark, whose killer was an ancient supernatural entity that had been hunting me specifically because I was something I hadn’t known I was until approximately an hour ago.
There was no version of this story that I could tell a detective.
I paid with cash I’d found in Dana’s desk drawer and smiled at the cashier, a teenager with dyed-black hair and a nose ring who looked at me with even more disinterest than I’d hoped.
The bags weren’t heavy. I stood outside in the morning light and held them and thought.
Then I made a decision.
I needed one night. Somewhere quiet, with a door I could lock and no amber eyes tracking my every move. I would eat something and get some sleep and take the time to think all of this through. Then I could go back and Silas and I could have a proper conversation with each other.
I started walking, and not toward Dana’s apartment.
* * *
After forty minutes of walking that took me progressively further from Dana’s neighborhood, I found a motel three blocks east of the transit plaza that seemed suitable enough.
It was called the Turquoise Sands, which was ambitious for the rundown two-story structure in front of me. The vacancy sign had a letter burned out so it readVACAN Y, and the parking lot featured a pickup truck with a tarp over the cab, a dented compact, and a shopping cart that had clearly been there long enough to develop roots.
Inside the office, a man in his sixties watched a small television mounted high on the wall and did not look at me when I came in, which was fine with me. I paid for a room in cash and he didn’t bat an eye, just handed me a key attached to a rubber fob the color of oxidized copper.
“Checkout’s at eleven,” he said, still watching the television. “Ice machine’s broken. Vending’s down the hall.”
“Great,” I said.
The room was on the first floor, second from the end. The door had two locks, a deadbolt and a chain, and the carpet was a shade of brown that exists to hide sins. There was a window ACunit that turned on with a noise like a man shaking a tin can full of bolts. The bed had a bedspread in a geometric southwestern pattern that was either a design choice or a camouflage strategy.
This was fine. I’d stayed in worse at climbing competitions in the middle of nowhere.
I put the grocery bags on the small table by the window, made myself a sandwich with the supplies I’d bought, and ate sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the wall.
It had a framed print of a roadrunner in a red rock canyon. I stared at it for a while and thought about nothing. Or at least tried to think about nothing.
A wolf has been inside me my whole life.
I took a bite of the sandwich. Outside, somewhere across the parking lot, a car door slammed. Voices carried briefly and then faded. The AC unit rattled.
I was going to turn into a wolf. At some unspecified point, probably soon, my skeleton was going to do the thing I’d watched Silas’s skeleton do on a cabin floor, and then I was going to be stuck as a wolf for some unspecified period of time before I could get back into my own tits.
Finishing my sandwich, I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
I was nearly asleep when I heard something through the wall. A gruff male voice, then an even gruffer response. Something hit the wall, a muffled impact, then silence, then the gruffer voice again, continuous and almost soothing in a way that wasn’t actually soothing.
