“Werewolves. Get over here.”
I walked in to Henrii Thibodaux’s restaurant, just off Highway 25, in the middle of the dinner hour. I smelled wolf instantly, even over the delicious aroma of fried seafood and grilled meat. I walked around the dining room, sniffing, checking out the men’s room, sticking my head into the kitchen just in case a wolf might be working as busboy, then made my way to the parking lot, where I lost them, their slightly sick-smelling scent hidden under the wood smoke billowing up from the cooking vents. They had been here, but they had been gone for a while. Standing alone in the lot, I made a couple of calls and went back inside.
I placed an order, joined Rick at a table and dug into beef ribs with Texas Two-Step sauce from Henrii’s sauce bar. Rick had already finished boudin balls with Black Voodoo sauce and two beers—Cajun food in the mountains. Only in America. All I’d done all day was eat. If I didn’t shift and hunt soon, I was gonna start gaining weight. I was also bruised, sore, and banged up, but the healing of a shift would have to wait.
“So.” He picked up a half-empty beer bottle and sipped. “Last time I saw you, you were half cat, half human.”
I paused, a rib halfway to my mouth. Oh crap.
“Kem calls you a Qora, or a Bouda. A shape-changer. He says only the most powerful ones can do the half shift.”
I sighed and bit all the meat off the rib in neat little nips, thinking. When I was done, I wiped my fingers and said, “You don’t look weirded out about this.”
Rick laughed, an incredulous note mixed with the humor. “I’m plenty weirded out, Babe. But you reach the point where your ability to react emotionally to all the new shit being tossed at you is gone.”
I ate another rib, watching him as he drank a third beer. He didn’t look inebriated. His shape-changer nature had affected his metabolism. Rick would find it hard to get a buzz. “I’ve never done that half-change thing before. What did it look like?”
Rick shook his head and drained the beer. The waitress brought him another, which he opened and sipped. “It was . . . bizarre. Grotesque and beautiful all at once. Wild and feral. It looked painful. The movies don’t do it justice.”
I nodded and finished another rib. The silence between us was far more comfortable than maybe it should have been. I was waiting for the other shoe to fall.
“The bikes were riding off when I got here,” Rick said, returning to business, “and the place reeked of wolf. Could you smell them?”
I nodded and licked my fingers; he pushed his food basket away and leaned back in the booth, stretching. He was wearing a T-shirt I’d seen before, a thin black weave of silk knit that revealed as much as it hid, when the light hit it just right. My eyes were drawn to the mass of white, slightly ridged scars on his shoulder and swiped across his abdomen, and then to the long play of muscles down his side and the ripple of abs.
He was watching me, a small smile on his lips. I closed my mouth and remembered to chew. But, Oh. My. Gosh. Fortunately, before I could react beyond a sinking, spreading heat, he said, “They’re chasing you to get even, chasing me to finish killing me. What else?”
“Trying to rebuild a pack. But they aren’t smart enough to do it in any kind of order. They’d be easier to catch if they were smart. Stupid is harder to predict. Random instead of logical. And”—I swallowed—“I’m not sure how they knew to come to Asheville and the Pigeon River in the first place.” That thought seemed important, though I didn’t know why. Yet. We chatted for a bit, almost like a real date. Until Billy Chandler, Chief of Police, walked in with two cops trailing like sycophants or servants, which they might as well have been. “I called them,” I said at Rick’s surprised start. “How do you want to play this?”
“In bed would be nice, but not with cops present.” I grinned at that and he went on, “I’ll say I saw them on their way out.” Rick was the only one in town, besides Grégoire and me, who had actually seen the wolves in person and not just in mug shots, so his strategy would work. I drained my Coke and watched the cops approach. Chandler had a mean look on his face. Easy to tell I wasn’t his favorite person.
“Spill it Yellowrock,” he said. “I don’t have time for your shit.”