I also hoped he tripped over a root on the way there at least once.
I was still enjoying the thought of him faceplanting into a pile of fresh moose poop when I heard a heavy crash and what sounded like wood splintering.
Someone was breaking down the door.
Another impact followed, and I sat up so fast the cuff jerked my wrist. My heart, which had been idling at a perfectly reasonable post-rage rate, redlined instantly, and I grabbed the headboard rail with both hands andpulled. Not the experimental, testing-the-waters pull I’d been doing up until now, but a full-body, adrenaline-fueled yank that used my legs braced against the mattress and every muscle in my back and shoulders all pulling with fight or flight imperative.
The rail groaned, and the bolts anchoring the headboard to the frame shifted a quarter inch in their housing. I pulled again and felt one bolt loosen further, the wood around it cracking, and I twisted the cuff along the rail to find the weakest point and pulled a third time with a sound that came from my chest that wasn’t entirely human.
The bolt gave. The rail separated from the frame with a crack of splitting wood, and I tumbled backward off the bed with three feet of iron railing dangling from my wrist, crashing onto the floor loudly enough to alert anyone in the compound that bedroom was very much occupied.
The front door burst open.
It wasn’t the supernatural, wrong-smelling, slow-approach entrance of the skinwalker. This was loud, coordinated, and accompanied by voices. Multiple voices, male, barking shortcommands in a tone I recognized from every cop show I’d watched.
“FBI! Federal agents! Hands where we can see them!”
I scrambled to my feet, clutching the sheet around my chest with one hand while the other dangled the segment of headboard rail from the handcuff like the world’s most impractical accessory. The first agent through the bedroom door was a man in a tactical vest with his weapon drawn. Behind him came another, and behind him a woman in an FBI windbreaker who was already holstering her sidearm because whatever she’d expected to find in this bedroom, a naked woman wrapped in a sheet was apparently not high enough on the threat matrix to keep it drawn.
The relief that it wasn’t the skinwalker lasted approximately four seconds before the reality of the alternative settled in.
“Katie Gregory?” The lead agent’s weapon was still level, and his eyes were doing the rapid-assessment thing, scanning me, the bed, the broken headboard, the cuff on my wrist.
“Yes.”
“Don’t move. Is there anyone else in the building?”
“No.”
“Are you injured?”
I looked down at myself, at the sheet, the handcuff, my bare feet, and the gauze on my forearm that was now hanging half-unwrapped from the headboard extraction. “A little, I guess.”
The female agent was already on her radio, speaking in clipped shorthand. The wordsperson of interest located,restrainedto furniture, andpossible kidnappingreached me through the static.
“Ma’am, we’re going to need you to come with us.”
“Can someone take this off first?” I held up my cuffed wrist with its dangling rail.
It took them four minutes to find a universal key. Four minutes during which I stood in the bedroom of the safe house wearing a sheet and a handcuff while three federal agents photographed the broken headboard, the open first aid kit, and the obviously just-fucked-in bed.
They gave me clothes. A gray sweatshirt with FBI stenciled on the back and a pair of standard-issue sweatpants that were two sizes too large, which was becoming a theme in my wardrobe lately. A female agent escorted me to a black SUV parked outside the compound gate, one hand on my upper arm that communicatedyou are not currently under arrest but you are absolutely not free to leave.
The drive to Albuquerque took more than an hour. I sat in the back seat behind a partition and watched the New Mexico landscape scroll past the window. The Jemez Mountains rose to the west, blue gray in the morning haze, and somewhere in those mountains Silas was hunting a creature by blood trail and had no idea his mate was now in the custody of the federal government.
The facility they brought me to was on the south side of Albuquerque, in a complex of low, beige buildings that looked architecturally committed to not being memorable. They walked me through a lobby with metal detectors, down a corridor with fluorescent lighting and linoleum that squeaked under myborrowed sneakers, and into a room that contained a metal table, three chairs, a camera mounted in the upper corner, and nothing else.
A guard took position outside the door. He was young, mid-twenties maybe, and looked like he had recently completed training and was still imitating competence rather than actually possessing it. He gave me a brief, uninterested glance as the door closed.
I sat in the chair that faced the camera and waited.
The agents came in together after maybe twenty minutes, long enough for me to have examined every scuff mark on the table and composed a mental draft of the violations of my rights I’d already catalogued.
The male agent was in his early forties, fit in the way men who work desk jobs but keep a gym membership are fit. He had short brown hair, a clean jaw, and brown eyes. He set a manila folder on the table without opening it and sat down across from me, his posture overly relaxed.
The female agent was younger, mid-thirties, with sharp features and dark hair pulled back in a bun that meant business. She took the chair beside him and crossed her legs and looked at me with what seemed like judgment.
“Miss Gregory,” the male agent said. “I’m Special Agent Harwood. This is Special Agent Davis.”
