Max Murphy had been my partner. He’d trusted my “instincts.” He’d wound up dying because of them, because of me.
I hadn’t been able to stomach remaining a cop after that so I’d taken a job as a bartender in the tavern owned by the widow. It was the least I could do.
“All right,” Ruthie agreed. “How long until you reach Inyan Kara?”
“A day or so. I’ll have to drive.”
Certainly I could shape-shift, and so could Luther, but I didn’t relish carrying a kitten in my mouth all the way to South Dakota. Besides, a lion loping down the road might cause quite a commotion.
We could fly, but I wasn’t sure about the rules for taking a baby on an airplane. I had no paperwork, and I’d need some. Then we’d get to the nearest airport, which I bet wasn’t exactly close to where we wanted to be, and we’d have to rent a car anyway. Better to take one already loaded with the weapons I liked to keep near.
“Can we use the Impala?”
The voice was Luther’s again. His hazel eyes were avid. He loved that car nearly as much as I did. Too bad the powder-blue ‘57 Chevy wasn’t really mine.
“Sure.” I grabbed my still-packed duffel off the floor next to my bed.
“Can I drive?”
“No.”
“But, Liz—”
“No license. No way.”
“If I can kill a prehistoric werebat—”
“Camazotz,” I corrected. “Mayan shape-shifter.”
Last week Luther and I had hopped a flight to Mexico, and I’d let him take the lead when we went after the bat-headed beast. He’d bagged it with his first shot.
“If I can kill a camazotz”—he rolled his eyes—“with a bronze-tipped arrow from a wooden bow, I think I can drive a stick shift.”
I knew letting him kill that thing was going to come back and bite me on the ass. Now he thought he could do anything.
“You get to hold the baby.”
“It’s not a baby,” he muttered.
“Kitten. Kid. Whatever.”
An hour later we were showered, fed, and packed. I’d tried to get Faith to eat something more solid than a bowl of milk but she just turned her nose up at the Chicken of the Sea I scrounged from a cabinet.
“You can’t feed tuna to a baby!” Luther objected as he scrubbed the water from his corkscrew hair with a towel.
“You said she wasn’t a baby.”
“Har-har.” He tossed the towel into the bathroom. It hit the floor with a wet thunk.
“Seriously?” I asked, and with a put-upon sigh he shuffled into the steamy room and hung the towel on a rack.
“How does she become a baby again?” Luther wondered. “The blanket turns her into a kitten but—” He waved at Faith as she chased dust through a spray of sunshine on the floor. “How does she turn back?”
I frowned.
“We have to imagine ourselves ourselves,” Luther continued. “But she’s so little. I don’t think she knows how. And it’s kind of hard to tell her when her vocabulary consists of wah and meow.”
“Fuck,” I muttered. See why I had no business taking care of a baby shape-shifter? I had no idea what made them work.
“You’re going to want to clean up your language or the first word out of her mouth is going to be—”
I lifted my hand. “I get the picture.”
I didn’t plan on being around Faith that long. I was going to Inyan Kara, learning what I could from Sani, raising Sawyer’s ghost, and finding out the answers to a few important questions.
For instance: Who was his next of kin?
There was no way I was raising a kitten-kid.
Megan lived on the east side of Milwaukee, about twenty minutes from Friedenberg on a block of older, closely spaced houses broken up by the occasional corner pub. Back in the day, every neighborhood boasted a tavern—at least in Wisconsin. Murphy’s had been one of them.
Now it was mostly a cop bar, though a lot of locals often hung out. Besides booze, Megan served sandwiches and heart-attack-producing appetizers such as deep-fried cheese curds. For the health-conscious she provided a wide selection of deep-fried vegetables. If you still weren’t dead, the dessert menu offered deep-fried Oreos, Twinkies, and cheesecake. They were really quite good.
However, for her daughter Anna’s party Megan had promised pizza, lemonade, and birthday cake—not deep-fried. The celebration started at eleven am since Megan would have to be at work by three. Saturday night was a big night at Murphy’s, and any tavern owner knew that the only way to make sure everything ran smoothly, and no one dipped into the till, was to be there.
Megan opened the door at our knock, took one look at the kitten in my arms, and slammed it in my face. I blinked, glanced at Luther, shrugged, and rang the bell.
“Go away!” she shouted through the door.
“You ordered me to be here.”