Page 45
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah . . .” he croaked, pushing onto his hands.
I stole a glance over the bar, but we were alone and the door hung open. The loup-garou had gone, perhaps after Duke and Victor.
“Zee, are you really alright? Can you stand?”
“Yeah, yeah, they’re just surface scratches. I got this.” He wobbled to his feet. “It’s a giant bug, right? You saw that? Some kind of fuck-off enormous ant thing?”
It was more than that. “Zee, it’s Jenny.”
“The fuck?!” He flung his wings wide and gave himself an all-over shake, dislodging more glass. “Gen Z Jenny? She’s the gut-slicing murder guru? No fuckin’ way. I liked her socials. Ugh.”
“We need to find Victor and Duke before she does.”
I should have seen it before. Jenny knew the pack’s daily routines, knew the area well, knew everyone who stayed at the motel and when the bar would be empty. But I didn’t know why she’d gone on a murder spree . . . not yet. Right now, though, our main concern had to be stopping her and finding the rest of Galbraith—and hope he was still alive.
“So, here’s a thought.” Zee limped alongside me out the front of the bar. “We could hop into the Murder Machine, grab Zander—since he’s the only nice person here—and hightail it the fuck out of Misty Psycho Town?”
“We made a vow.”
“Oh, fuck. Ugh. You have morals. Right.”
“Victor?” I called. The motel and its eerily quiet lot swallowed my voice. No traffic, no signs of life at all. The mist had never really left, but clung on even heavier, obscuring the forest in all directions.
“He’s tough. He won’t let her cut him up twice.” Zee tried to reassure me and probably himself too. “Man, it sucks it’s her. Are you sure?”
“Pretty much, yeah. I’m guessing she used the perfume to cover her scent.”
“But she’s so small and cutsey, and she had all those little succulents in tiny pots.”
“Speaking from experience, small and cute is how the best predators hide.”
“Over there . . .” Zee hobbled toward our van, and the patch of blood sinking into the ground beside it. “That can’t be good. You think it’s Victor’s?”
“I don’t know . . .” But there was a trail of scuff marks and drips of blood heading into the forest.
“Ugh, of course she’s going into the woods, where all the fun things happen and definitely nobody dies.”
“We have to follow.”
“Yeah.” Zee gave his wings a shake. “And I can’t even get a look from above through this mist. This is the worst fuckin’ motel ever—even worse than ours. I’m leaving a one-star review.”
We followed the trail around the back of the motel, where a few broken air-conditioning units hummed and rattled. The forest suddenly looked very deep and dark and not at all friendly.
“Yeah, after this place, I’m really beginning to miss our hotel.”
“I even miss the gremlins,” Zee said. “I gave ’em names.”
“All of them?”
“Hard to tell. They all sorta look the same.”
“Victor?” I called, but the thick trees stopped the sound dead.
“I even named the real fuckin’ grumpy one Victor—you know, the one who looks like a potato that’s been in the ground too long?” Zee chuckled . . . then swallowed, and stared into the murky gloom between the pillar-like trunks.
“I know the one.” The grumpy gremlin looked nothing like Victor, but its personality wasn’t far off.
