I woke with my head on my boots, my body veiled by my hair. A spider perched only inches away, a big black hairy thing thrown into monster-sized silhouette by a dark gray dawn. It skittered way, shrinking to palm sized, as I pushed to my hands and knees and then to my feet. I threw back my hair and studied the situation. The car I’d been driving when forced off the road, then crashed, then been shot in, was canted at an angle, the engine silent. I could smell the road nearby, an overlay of exhaust placing it to my right.
Overhead, a hawk flew, black against the dark sky. It called, greeting the day with a piercing cry. I was muzzy-headed. And shivering. And hungry. Confused. Yeah. Confused. But I knew that it was too early for most species of hawk to hunt. Something had disturbed it.
My clothes were in a pile at my feet, which was weird, because I’d been in the car, and no way had I made it here before shifting into big-cat. I’d been too close to death. Beast had forced a shift when I couldn’t, but I didn’t remember anything after that, which wasn’t normal. Even in the worst of shifts, when I was on the brink of death and only a shift into another form brought healing, I always, eventually, found myself inside Beast’s body, along for the ride, just as Beast was along for the ride when I was in human shape.
I always remembered at least something of my time in fur. I didn’t remember anything this time. Yet I was alive. I bent and found my panties and bra and pulled them on, making a face at the dried blood. I pulled on the ruined pants and stuck my fingers through the hole in the shirt. Two fingers. One hole. Yeah. It had been a big-assed gun. I found the new scar under my left arm and between my ribs, which corresponded to the hole in the shirt, and tried to figure what had been hit to make me bleed out so fast. And then I found the other scar on the right side, a little lower. The bullet had blown straight through me at an angle, probably taking out a kidney, maybe the bottom tip of my lung, and the top of my liver on the right. Bowel for sure. But kidney and liver were the likely kill spots; both organs had juicy blood supplies. I had an indentation on the right side big enough to put two knuckles in, so a big chunk of tissue had been taken out. I’d have to shift several times to smooth that out, and like the other, older kill shot on my upper chest, it might never go away completely. The old scar seemed to be permanent, I figured, because I had only shifted the one time, before I wandered out of the woods to be found by humans, and I had stayed in human form for years. These days, I shift often enough that most of the lethal wounds disappear. Most. Eventually. Even the scars on my neck from several near beheadings. Vamp hunting is dangerous business. My stomach cramped with hunger. I needed to eat. Soon.
Headlights lit up the road in the distance and I hurriedly finished dressing, shoving the empty gun into my waistband, holstering the others, and pulling the boots on over my bare feet. My socks were nowhere to be found. My black jacket hid some of the dried blood, clothing damage, and weapons, but not enough to allow me to safely hitch a ride once the sun was high. No one would stop for a bloody, armed, Amazon-sized woman on the side of the road, so I had to get moving before the sun rose.
I checked the ground as I made my way back to the car. No boot prints led away. No blood splatters marked the ground. No indication I had come this way. Just the rare sliding mark.
I stopped and bent, studying the ground up close as the sun peeked over a butte. Red light spread out over the earth, a rosy crystal clarity of illumination that revealed a paw print to the side of the slide mark. I blinked. Beast had come this way, and something had then covered her tracks. I looked back at the rock I had waked up near, and back to the car. And down at my filthy pants, long streaks of dust marking them. “Son of a gun,” I murmured. “Smart girl.” It almost seemed like she was getting smarter, more intelligent, more able to cope with the human world, though she would have hated that thought. Beast didn’t answer.
I moved on to the car and gathered up my weapons and gear, trying to see what had happened. I’d wounded the man who killed me. His blood trail was easy to follow. I bent and sniffed, smelling the vamp who had fed the blood-servant, and something metallic underneath the vamp-scent. Odd. They had followed me, shot me, one had been shot, and they left. The blood trail got heavier the closer to the road it got. I wondered if the man had made it to a hospital or died on the way. It was getting time to ditch the nine-mil. There were too many shootings tied to it, and if a surgeon or a coroner found a silver bullet, one of the rare, expensive hand-loaded rounds made especially for killing vamps, it would come back to haunt me. I opened the tote and pulled the top off a blood collection tube. Scooped up some dirt and dried blood. Resealed the tube. I didn’t know if anyone could test a dirt/blood mixture, but if they could, it would be nice to know whatever the lab tests could tell me.
I slung the tote over my shoulder and trudged to the road, thinking about the phone in the Lear. I really shoulda brought a second cell.
*