Simon deflated a little bit then, and he had the grace to at least look embarrassed. “Well . . . yeah. Although it’s also possible that the creature ate a body that was already dead,” he pointed out. “But you don’t get it, Lex. I’ve been studying Old World systemics for years, but there’s just never been enough data to make the connections I need. Whatever made that pellet, if it’s real, could be the Rosetta stone for everything I’ve been working on since I was twenty. Why some species intermingled with magic, and most didn’t.”
Anxiety burned in my stomach, but I wasn’t sure what was causing it. Something about that pellet felt wrong to me, but Simon was so excited . . . I was probably just exhausted. I’d been up for nearly thirty hours without real sleep, and I wasn’t a kid anymore. If I didn’t get some rest soon, my vision was going to double.
I dropped Simon off at CU as requested, and finally headed back toward the cabin. After a moment of indecision, I called Lily on the way and filled her in on the morning’s events. I didn’t explicitly say I was worried about Simon, but she read between the lines and promised to check on him after her yoga class. Lily had bounded around from job to job after leaving med school, and at the moment she was cobbling together a living by teaching yoga, selling her photography, and who knew what else. She also served as the de facto doctor for a lot of the witches, myself included. She would check on whether Simon was pushing his body too hard. She offered to come take a look at my head wound, but by now it was just a bump and a small cut that I could hide behind my hair. I thanked her and said I was fine.
I went back to the cabin, showered, minding the bump on my head, and managed to grab a couple of hours of sleep. When my alarm went off I made hasty arrangements for my cousin Brie to check on the herd if I wasn’t back by evening. I spent a fair amount of my spare time babysitting for free, which allowed me to call in such favors when necessary. I grabbed a big to-go cup of coffee at Magic Beans and was on the road to Wyoming by one.
I had a date with a werewolf.
Chapter 10
I’ve spent so much of my life in Boulder—pretty much all of it, minus my time overseas—that sometimes I forget that there are other places. That sounds childish, I know, but I love Colorado, and the hour and a half drive up to Wyoming was a nice, scenic reminder of why. I hadn’t had much sleep, and I’d spent most of the previous night in the car too, but damn if I didn’t have a large delicious coffee, a padded seat, and Brandi Carlile on the old car’s sound system. It was weirdly relaxing. By the time I reached Cheyenne, I had shed most of the anxiety and sense of wrongness that the gastric pellet had stirred up in me.
And also I really had to pee.
Pit stop accomplished, I followed directions on my phone until I pulled into the gate of the Southern Wyoming Sanctuary for Wolves. It was a large wooded property spread out over a series of small hills, and the whole thing was divided into multiple fenced-in paddocks. As I parked the car and walked up the muddy driveway to the welcome center, I could see a pair of wolves peering at me through one of the massive chain-link fences, about twenty feet away.
I stopped in my tracks, gaping at them for a moment. I’d expected them to be big, of course, but I realized in that moment that I had imagined big dogs, like Chip and Cody. The wolves just felt different from any of my dogs. They didn’t bark when a stranger approached, for one thing, and they gave off an air of detached assessment, like I was being sized up as a food source. Which I probably was. I kept my eyes on the ground and hurried forward to the sanctuary building.
Just inside the door was an enormous wooden receptionist desk, which formed a sort of gateway to the rest of the main room. There was a big cash register on the desk, and most of the room beyond appeared to be devoted to selling wolf-themed objects.
“Good afternoon!” chirped the receptionist, a pretty teenager with a dark curly ponytail spilling out of a khaki hat. The letters “SWSW” were embroidered on both the hat and her polar fleece jacket. She had an ID badge on a lanyard around her neck that read “Christy.” “Welcome to the Sanctuary for Wolves! Are you here for the feeding tour?”
Excessively cheerful people unnerve me. “Um, yeah,” I said awkwardly. “Am I early?”
“Just a bit! Your tour guide will be taking you guys out in about ten minutes,” she promised. I nodded my thanks and wandered around the small gift shop area, examining the wolf-themed trinkets and posters, from “dog tag” necklaces (cute) to mugs to posters and T-shirts. Behind the merchandise, the walls were decorated with newspaper articles about wolves and signs directing the reader to call their congressman about wolf protection laws.
I raised my phone and snapped a picture of the instructions, thinking I might do that when the current crisis was over. I had nothing against wolves, per se. If anything, I felt a little sorry for them, because a long time ago some shapeshifting conduits—the ancestors of all Old World creatures, myself included—had decided to limit their magic to one animal transformation, and they’d chosen wolves as their alternate form. Wolves hadn’t asked to be infiltrated by magical human hybrids who would go on to commit terrible acts, any more than regular red blood cells ask to be infiltrated by cancer.
The rest of the tour group arrived: half a dozen high school kids and a chaperone, some sort of after-school nature club. The kids were jocular and teasing, bumping around the crowded retail space like so many overgrown pups. After one of them sent a display of necklaces crashing to the ground, the middle-aged chaperone lost her patience and threatened to donate the lot of them as the wolves’ next meal. The kids sobered up fast after that—they’d seen the two wolves at the entrance too.