My glasses fell off, but I wasn’t hurt. I could hear, rather than see, the werewolf’s body scrape on the asphalt, and a yelp of pain followed. It was getting dark quickly now, but werewolves could see perfectly well with just a little bit of moonlight. My only chance was to end this fight fast, and for that I needed weapons.
I kicked off the clogs and managed to take about one step toward Opal’s car before the werewolf sprang up, spitting mad—and spitting gravel. Then she was running toward me again, her fingers curled like claws and a low growl coming from her throat. In the dimming light I could just barely make out scrapes on her face and a trickle of blood running into one eye. They would heal quickly, but it gave me an idea.
She charged me again. I managed to dodge her, but barely—she was just so fast. I wasn’t going to be able to get out of the way a third time, so I pivoted as quickly as I could on one heel, like a basketball player. When she slammed into the car behind me, an old minivan, I got a fistful of her long hair, planted my feet, and slammed her head into the window once, twice, three times, spiderwebbing the glass.
I would happily have kept going, but she twisted toward me, wrenching around far enough to land a clumsy haymaker that hit me with the force of a baseball bat.
I let go of her hair, staggering backward as pain exploded in my cheekbone—but it had worked: I had opened more cuts in her forehead. She was momentarily blinded from the blood running into her eyes, and she smeared at it with her hands, letting out a cry of rage.
I rushed around her and sprinted for Opal’s Malibu without looking back. If she recovered in time to catch me, I was dead. Seeing it coming wouldn’t make any difference.
Thank God I had Opal’s car instead of my own ancient Subaru. It recognized the key fob in my pocket and unlocked as I ran up. I yanked the door open, dropped to my knees, and was digging under the seat for my weapons when the werewolf reached me.
She could have killed me pretty easily right then by slamming the door against my spine, but instead she yanked on my waistband, dragging me out of the car. I rolled onto my back with the revolver in my hands and saw that she had a weapon too: a three-inch blade.
What the hell? Since when did werewolves need pocketknives?
“Stop,” I warned, releasing the safety on my weapon. “Drop the knife.”
She grinned at me with bloody teeth. Her face was a mask of red, but the cuts had stopped bleeding, and the whites of her eyes seemed to glow. “That won’t kill me,” she said, stepping forward.
“Silver bullets,” I snapped.
She froze, frowning with uncertainty. “You’re bluffing,” she said.
“You’re downwind. Do I smell like I’m bluffing?”
“All I smell right now is blood.” She licked the blood off her lips, sticking her tongue all the way out to reach as much as possible. It was disgusting, but I figured she was trying to unnerve me and said nothing. She sniffed the air and her eyes widened with fear. Like Keith, she’d caught the smell of silver. She took a step back.
“Drop the knife,” I said again. This time she did it. I stood up slowly, pulling the burner phone out of my pocket and activating the flashlight so I could see her properly.
She was short, white, and muscular, with cropped black hair, wearing expensive hiking boots over jeans, and a soft-looking flannel shirt. It didn’t look like she’d planned to turn into a wolf anytime soon. “What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Heather.” She bared her bloody teeth in a parody of a grin.
“Are you out here alone?” I asked.
“For now. Others are coming.”
“How many?”
She didn’t answer me. “Do you really want me to shoot you in the leg to get you to talk?” I asked. “I’d hate to think what might happen if the bullet doesn’t go all the way through.” As I understood it, a werewolf could heal from a through-and-through at roughly the same speed as a human, but they could die from silver poisoning if the bullet was left inside.
The smug look fell off Heather’s face, and she answered in a sullen voice, “Two more. They’ll be here any second.”
“Why did you attack me?” I demanded.
She shrugged. “Nothing personal.”
I realized, with a shock, that she actually meant that. In all the excitement I’d forgotten my disguise, but this woman seemed to have no idea who I was. Which meant I hadn’t been specifically targeted. “Get out your phone,” I ordered. “Slowly.”
She did as I asked, producing an iPhone in a protective case. “Text your friends,” I instructed. “Write this exactly: ‘Don’t come; the whole thing is off.’ If you add anything else, I will shoot you. Then I will wait here with my silver bullets, and ambush your pals as they pull up.”
Heather didn’t have much of a poker face. I could pretty much see the wheels turning in her head: she and her friends had been expecting a bunch of weak, fragile witches; silver bullets changed the rules of engagement. “All right,” she said finally. “I’ll call them off.”
I wasn’t going to come any closer, considering how fast she was, so I made her turn slightly so I could see her unlock the phone and start typing. She sent the text, but before I could tell her to toss me the phone, she lifted her arm and slammed it down like a football, spiking it into the asphalt.
Even with the case, the phone seemed to explode into pieces. I guess the manufacturer hadn’t factored in werewolf strength. I cursed loudly, but I didn’t move, not wanting to give her an opening. “Good luck getting information off that,” she said smugly.
I gritted my teeth with frustration, but I was running out of time. “Why are you killing witches?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Don’t know. Don’t care.”
“Who are you working for?”
“Same answer.”
Ugh. “How many were you supposed to kill?”
“As many as we could cull from the herd without getting caught.” She lifted her chin in defiance, glaring at me over the light. “We get a bonus for every corpse.”
The herd? I’d met a few werewolves now, but none of them had talked as if humans, or witches, were their prey. On a wild hunch, I said, “You were with Trask’s pack, weren’t you?”
Her face darkened, but she didn’t answer. “That’s a yes,” I said.
“Well—” she began, and then she lunged at me.
If she’d turned and run away, into the darkness, I probably wouldn’t have been able to catch her. She couldn’t afford to let me get away, though, and she was hoping I’d be too startled to react quickly.
I wasn’t startled, but I wasn’t nearly as fast as her, and she was smart enough to go for my arm first, pushing the sidearm into the air. Her fingers tightened on mine, and I pulled the trigger, letting off one deafening shot. The werewolf squeezed my fingers upward like she was squeezing yogurt out of one of those tubes, and at last I cried out and let go, the revolver tumbling to the ground. She gave it one fierce kick in the direction of the barn, then hooked my leg and toppled me over, her body pressing onto my chest. The burner phone flew out of my other hand, and I heard an alarming crack as it landed on the asphalt and the flashlight winked out.
I tried to throw my weight sideways to pitch her off, but she hit me, a lazy slap across the same cheekbone she’d punched earlier. Pinpricks of light danced in front of me. I beat my fists against her as hard as I could, but she just snarled, absorbing the impact.
Then she was wriggling around, and I realized belatedly that she was pulling something from one of her boots, probably a weapon.
I blinked hard, trying to clear the lights, trying to think of something—then the werewolf gasped and arched up, and almost simultaneously I heard the gunshot.
Chapter 23
The silver bullet must have hit something important in the werewolf’s back, because she went limp almost immediately, her body slumping on top of me.
I swore, shoving the werewolf to the side and rolling free. I came up on my knees, and a different phone flashlight flicked on. In the screen’s illumination, Katia was peering down at me, perfectly calm. “Thanks,” I said in a gasp.
“You’re welcome. Is she dead?”
“I think so.” I knelt beside the body, trying to avoid the blood, and checked her pulse—already gone.
“Will they come to investigate the gunshots?” Katia asked.
“In Wyoming? I doubt it. There’s plenty of hunting around here.” I flexed the hand she’d squeezed. It was sore, but I didn’t think any of the bones were broken.
When I looked up, Katia was frowning thoughtfully at the body. “Should we leave her?”
I followed her gaze down to the werewolf. In death, she had lost the glow of health and sense of barely contained energy that I’d come to associate with werewolves. Without magic, her body now looked . . . well, like a dead human’s. “We can’t leave her,” I told Katia. “If one of the witches finds the body, they’ll assume she was a witch too. They’ll start looking for a murderer.” They would probably also call the police, since there was nothing apparently supernatural about the cause of death.
Another nod. “How did you know to come after me?” I asked Katia.
She shrugged. “I started thinking that Valerya wouldn’t have told me to come here just to listen to the witches talk. I was supposed to come here for you, so I should stick with you.” She tilted her head at the werewolf as if to say, and that’s why.
I said a silent thank-you to my dead birth mother. “Okay. Hang on a minute.”
While Katia leaned casually against the nearest car, I went and checked the burner phone. It was useless—the battery had detached from the phone, and the mechanism that usually held them together had broken off. I stuck both pieces in my jacket pocket, and Katia held up her light while I went back to search the werewolf.
Along with the knives, she had been carrying a set of keys, a crumpled gas receipt, a money clip with two hundred dollars in cash, some gum wrappers, and a thick wad of industrial-strength, gallon-sized ziplock bags. I frowned at those for a second, flipping them around in the beam of light. They were completely empty. Why the hell would—
Then I realized what the baggies meant, and that we needed to move a lot faster. I looked at Katia. “Where did you park?”
She pointed toward the back of the lot. “Last row, on the east end.”
“Okay. Do me a favor? Go back to the meeting and pull the fire alarm in”—I checked my watch—“ten minutes. I’ll meet you at your car after.”
She raised her eyebrows, but when I didn’t offer an explanation, she gave a little shrug and handed me the revolver. Then she turned around, sauntering back toward the building.
I picked up the werewolf under her arms, hoisting her into the trunk of the Malibu. In my sock feet, I padded back down the road until I nearly tripped over the clogs I’d stepped out of. I put them back on and stood there for a moment, debating with myself. First things first: I needed to hide the car. But where? It was too dark to see anything except the road I was standing on. If I ran the car off the road, some Good Samaritan might see it, which would eventually lead to someone checking the trunk. There was a patch of forest nearby, but the car didn’t have four-wheel drive, and trying to make it to the tree line would probably just mean ending up in the ditch.