By four p.m. I was tired, cold, wet, hungry, and probably permanently deaf. The constant rain was a white noise that drowned out every other sound, a steady, deadening, deafening roar that only got louder when we had to cross swollen streams and cascades. The falling temperatures had made everything miserable, with a lowlying fog shrouding the ground like heavy gauze, hiding puddles, runnels, holes, roots, protruding rocks, and ruts. Laurel and rhodo thickets had meant crawling bent over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and my palms were torn and blistered and wrinkled up like raisins. The wind was traitorous, delicate and warm one moment, buffeting us with cold the next.
Not even Gortex is designed to resist a hurricane, and my boots and jeans had failed the stream-crossing test. Even my underwear was sodden. Rick had brought several pounds of raw steaks in his backpack for Kem, and a jumbo-sized pack of high-cal trail mix for us. If not for the nuts, coconut, and dried tropical fruit, I’d have been tempted to try to steal from Kem-cat, which would have been gross and stupid.
To make the experience more wretched, as far as I could tell, we were lost. I had no idea what the leopard had discovered. We hadn’t seen a real road—one paved in the last century—in hours, and we had crawled up and down steep slopes until east and west were alien concepts, even for me. If Kem wanted to lead us out into unknown territory and leave us to die, he couldn’t have found a better place for it. Grumpy. That was me. Ahead, I saw two dark mounds emerging from the fog. Once we were upon them, they resolved into our vehicles. I lay across the hood and panted, my relief so strong I wanted to weep.
“Big, bad vamp killer, reduced to a whining mass of female flesh by a little water,” Rick teased. The look I gave him shut him up and he backed away, palms open wide in a mock protective gesture, eyes laughing. The first time we’d been alone together I’d taken him down, but something about the way he backed off, with a confident swagger I hadn’t seen before, suggested that now I might not have it so easy.
I crawled into the SUV and turned the seat warmers on high, the heater on max, and the windshield warmer on. I sat in a miserable heap and shivered until the interior was toasty and my core temp started to warm. Then I crawled around in the back for anything that might keep me warm, coming up with a tire iron, a tool box, a ragged fleece blanket, and a pair of cargo pants left balled in a corner by God-knows-who. The scent wasn’t familiar and the pants were none too clean, having been used as a towel to wipe a mechanic’s greasy hands, but I stripped and pulled them on, hoping I wouldn’t get body lice or worse. The blanket, I ripped a head hole in with a screwdriver and tore a ribbon off one end to use as a belt. I was just barely presentable when a human-shaped Kem and Rick got into the vehicle with me, Kem in the passenger seat, his feet on my soaked clothes, and Rick lounging in back. Rick, wearing dry clothes, looked me over and laughed before passing me a king-sized Snickers bar. After the laugh, I should have refused on principle but I took it and started chewing.
Kem wasn’t impressed either way, though he accepted a Snickers as well, and ate it in huge, half-chewed bites. He opened another, gesturing with it in what sounded like a non sequitur in his elegant African accent. “The grindylow no longer function according to its previous and proper purpose. It should be able to track the werewolves once it has taken their human and were scents, and it should have killed them long before now. It isn’t, it hasn’t. Its scent pattern has change in ways with which I am not familiar. It appears to be moving much more slowly than normal, spending long moments in one place, doing what appears to be”—he stopped, as if unable to find the right word—“nothing. Perhaps it is . . . resting.”
The emphasis on the word resting made it sound foreign to the little green-skinned grindy. “They don’t rest?”
“No. Never. Not as long as human is in danger. Perhaps it is . . . ill.” But he didn’t look fearful, Kemnebi looked ecstatic at the prospect. The grindylow had killed Kem’s mate for trying to infect Rick. Kem hoped he’d die.
I frowned, adjusted the blower at my midsection, and ate another candy bar, curling one leg under my butt for comfort as I angled myself to face him. “The grindy didn’t stop the weres in New Orleans from repeatedly biting Rick. Torturing him.” Rick went utterly still, and I could suddenly smell the stress and fear-memory leaching from his pores. He was remembering.
Kem’s lip curled at the smell. He slanted a look to the back, at Rick. “The grindylow was beleaguered in New Orleans. His mistress broke were-law with this human.” Kem’s eyes took on a voracious glow at the word. “He knew that were-law required her death. He . . . loved Safia. Her death was painful to him and was responsible for the delay in tracking the wolves.”