“Maybe not,” I said. “I have a few contacts with the vamps. They have some healers.”
Emmett snorted, not impressed with vamp healers. He muttered under his breath something insulting about suckheads, weres, and witches in his county. I glanced at Molly, an earth witch, who ignored him, so I ignored the comment too, thinking instead about the logistics of getting a Mercy Blade here to heal the injured couple. I didn’t know if there was a Mercy Blade in North Carolina or Tennessee, but I’d find one somewhere. I turned my attention to other logistics.
“How far”—I paused, uncertain, trying to recall the distance from a long-ago vacation—“is it from here to the Mississippi River?” The last time I’d seen a grindylow was on a bayou that emptied into the Mississippi, west of New Orleans. And New Orleans was the birthplace of everything that happened to me for the past six months, most of it bad. I wanted to know how the green-skinned, semiaquatic grindy got from there to here. Sure as heck not on a Harley.
“It’s four hundred miles from Knoxville to Memphis,” Dave said, his voice raspy and soft in contrast to Mike’s booming volume. Memphis was a Mississippi port city, and provided the most direct route overland to the river, but the water-loving grindy hadn’t taken an overland route.
I indicated a group of playboat kayakers coasting in after a run on the Upper Pigeon. The small, human teenager–sized grindy would likely need as much water as a playboat. “Is it possible to paddle from the Mississippi to here, if you only count water big enough to handle something that size, and you prefer cold water, rocks, and privacy?” I looked around at the numbers of boaters. “Usually.”
The guides both looked northwest, downstream. Dave squinted, shading his blue eyes with a hand, and said, “If you can jump dams and paddle a lot of miles of waterway, all upstream.” He paused to draw in air, and my eyes slid to the scars on his throat. They looked like the result of a down and dirty tracheotomy, though I’d never asked how he came by them. “Then yes. The Pigeon goes west to Knoxville, eventually joins into the French Broad, and heads south into northern Alabama. It empties into the Tennessee River, which empties into the Miss.”
Mike added, “I know people who’ve paddled the distance downstream, but it’s a hell of a long paddle even moving with the current. I don’t know anyone who’s paddled it upstream.”
I didn’t know what the grindy’s speed was, or whether it could handle long distances or upstream currents. Which might mean that the grindy had hitched a ride on boats, making it a once-mythical supernat who was comfy with modern transportation. I smiled sourly. I didn’t know much about grindies and had been hoping to keep it that way. But the grindy wasn’t my problem. The wolves were.
I looked up and out, seeing the gorge where the rafting businesses were nestled in the little town of Hartford, Tennessee. Just within visual distance, there were thousands of square acres where wolves could run and hunt and never be seen by a human. If I was wolf hunting in Beast form, it would take a long time to cover this much territory. Wolves liked to run long distances. Beast wasn’t fond of it, wasn’t built for it, and even with humans in danger, she would fight me every step of the way. Beast is not dog, she murmured into my mind, sounding sleepy. Do not hunt nose to ground. I scowled and walked from the water, its tinkling quickly muted by the sound of nearby Interstate 40, back toward Fang.
The wind changed, and I caught a scent of wolf away from the water. On the far side of the road, something gleamed in the bright sun. Silver-tipped wood. It was mine. I sometimes lost stakes in the heat of battle, easy for an enemy to take. I bent and picked up the sterling silver–tipped ash-wood stake.
Deep inside, my Beast hissed with displeasure and showed killing teeth. The wolves had left me a personal message and challenge. I looked around. No one except Molly had seen me pick up the stake. She watched with a quizzical expression as I sniffed along its length, smelling wolf, sweat, motor oil, something spicy like Mexican food, and cheap liquor. No help here. No scent clue jumping out and saying, “The wolves stayed there, in that hotel in that town last night.” Giving Molly a small shrug, I tu [l samed in tcked the stake into a belt loop.