Marlow ran.
That was step one of his plan. He hoped that step two would come to him soon. He cut diagonally across the road and took a right into a narrow, high-walled alley that smelled of cigarette smoke, fried cauliflower, and greasy water. A rat, well-fed and healthy despite the missing half of its tail, watched him with glossy ink-drop eyes from the top of a dumpster.
It held its ground until Marlow was close enough to kick it; then it flicked that truncated tail and scuttled up the wall to the fire escape. It swung briefly from the steps, like a rodent gymnast, and then shinnied up the railing toward the second floor.
Marlow broke stride for a second as he tilted his head to track the rat’s progress. Half a plan flashed through his mind—climb onto the dumpster, grab the bottom rung of the fire escape, head up—and was rejected. It might have worked… if the wolf wasn’t Cade.
A chance hunt might be abandoned if the trail went cold or it got too hard. There was other meat to be had in the city. But Cade’s wolf had imprinted on Marlow when the moon pulled it out; the memory of an interrupted kiss and the delicate tension between flirtation and complication refined down to simple, hungry want.
It was hardly the sort of doomed, bloody romance that Shakespeare had written Romeo and Juliet about. Cade wouldn’t follow the ache in his chest across a whole city to find Marlow and eat his heart. But he didn’t need to. Marlow had been right there, ripe with sweat and fresh blood, to whet Cade’s appetite.
And then Marlow had set him on fire.
That was the sort of thing that kept a werewolf on your heels all night long.
Marlow pushed himself back into a run. It was hard. The brief pause had filled his legs with lead, heavy and sore as he dodged around the dumpster and loped past sealed delivery doors and padlocked garages. A sprawl of graffiti over the brick wall back of a building, paint sprayed thickly over small square windows, caught his attention. A cartoonish Ganesh hung placidly in the middle of a swirl of symbols and images. In the daytime, he’d be vivid bubblegum pink and cyan, but the moon dimmed him to grays and flesh tones. He was supposed to be lucky, protection against the wolves.
Either way Marlow recognized it. He’d been here before. Last time there’d been more blood and a half-dead boar someone had let loose in city limits holed up in someone’s garage.
He’d known roughly where he was—the impact couldn’t have thrown the car that far—but this was a solid landmark. The mental map of the city in his head reoriented around it, and he might even have a plan.
Not a great one, but a plan.
There was a homeless shelter at St Anne’s over on Irving. If he could get there in time, they’d let him in. Father Bellamy was told a couple of times a year to keep his doors locked once the moon was up, leave the Night Shift to deal with any problems, and he’d never listened yet.
It was a ten-minute run. Five, if he cut through the skate park.
Marlow risked a glance over his shoulder. A greasy pillar of smoke from the burning car eddied up into the air, but he couldn’t hear Cade’s enraged howls anymore.
He didn’t have ten minutes.
The end of the alley was a few yards ahead of him when something dropped out of the sky and landed in front of him with a wet splat. He stepped on it, and it gave under his boot with a crackle of thin bones. Blood and guts squeezed out of it, and instinct made Marlow stagger as he tried to shift his weight off the thing.
It was a rat. Most of a rat, anyhow. The head had been torn off, and it still only had half a tail. Marlow hopped away from the little corpse and looked up toward the rooftops. A shadow hunched up there, half lost in the darkness, and then it was gone.
“Shit,” Marlow said softly.
If Cade had caught up with him already, he probably didn’t have five minutes. He didn’t have any other ideas though, so he bolted for the end of the alley. His focus narrowed to the ground immediately in front of him and the route he’d laid out in his head. Two yellow stripes flashed by under his feet, and he stretched his legs to take the curb in his stride.
A narrow path jinked down between two black cast iron fences—overgrown grass on one side and a cracked patch of concrete on the other, bleached patterns on the ground to show where the playset had been dragged in out of harm’s way. A gate swung off warped hinges, something to repair in the light of day, and blocked the way.
Marlow vaulted it. It cost him when he landed, a jolt of pain in his knee that spiked up to his groin and nearly buckled his leg. He forced the next step and the next. By the third, his body accepted the pain wasn’t going to make a difference and rerouted it to a less insistent ache.
A naked man, a joint between his lips, watched placidly from the roof of his garage as Marlow raced past.
Six minutes now. The gate had cost him.
He crossed another road and into the car lot outside the skate park. A ragged pennant for the Conquistadors from Serra High School flapped from a pole near the football field, a long shadow that snapped and stretched over the pocked, uneven ground.
Maybe he’d make it after—
Something slammed into him from the side, and Marlow lost his train of thought as he went flying. He hit the chain-link and went through it, the nails-on-chalkboard scrape of broken metal on metal loud in the relative silence. Skin scraped off against the metal hooks as he rolled on the other side. The air left his body on a croak, and his lungs cramped shut behind his ribs. He wheezed as he tried to suck in air and get to his feet at the same time.
“Cade,” he tried, the words hoarse and trapped in his throat. It never worked; he always tried. “Don’t—”
It wasn’t Cade.
The wolf opposite him was wiry, muscle and skin shrink-wrapped over bone, with thick black fur and a missing ear. He grinned, lips skinned back from broken teeth, and waited.
