Bereft of her alpha, Lizzy came cringing into the clearing, weak and injured. I was pretty sure that not all of those injuries were physical. I motioned for Jesse to take Shadow’s collar and he did, leading her a few feet behind me. Then I painfully knelt down on the ground and called, very softly, “Lizzy. Lizzy Thompkins.”
The wolf’s eyes flicked to me once, confused, and she stopped, her paws dancing nervously on the ground like she was ready to bolt. No one has ever been able to really explain to me how much of themselves the werewolves retain when they’re not in human form, so I had no idea if any of this would work. “Lizzy, shh, it’s okay,” I said soothingly. “He’s dead. And we know someone who can help you.” I held out a hand. “If you could just come a little closer, I promise I won’t hurt you.”
Lizzy edged a tiny bit closer to me, and when nothing bad happened, a little closer still. I felt the bargest shifting restlessly behind me, but Jesse stroked her and murmured reassuringly. Finally Lizzy took the last step she needed to get into my radius, and flopped to the ground, human again. I thought she was going to stay there, but she kept moving, crawling closer and closer, until she reached me. She was older than I’d imagined, maybe in her early-or mid-thirties, a skinny mixed-race woman with dark hair that spilled down her back in matted snarls. Then Lizzy pulled herself half into my lap and collapsed there, sobbing.
I looked up at Jesse with surprise, but he just gave me a sad smile. Passing the bargest’s leash from hand to hand, he took off his jacket and handed it to me. I draped it over her shoulders. When that was done, Jesse asked, “Phase two?”
I nodded, awkwardly patting Lizzy’s shoulder. “Phase two.”
Chapter 47
Jesse and Shadow took off for the van first, and I followed with Lizzy Thompkins gripping my free hand in both of hers. She still hadn’t said a word, but she seemed to feel safer when she was touching me; maybe because I was female, or maybe just because I’d spoken to her first. I’m not a particularly touchy-feely person, but after what Lizzy had been through in the last two days, I was willing to deal with a little awkwardness if it gave her the tiniest bit of security. Our strange procession made its way toward the road, and I felt the little pop of the Humans-Go-Home spell dissolving as I got close to it.
Jesse put Shadow in the back of the van and grabbed a bag of supplies we’d prepared earlier. He dragged out his new gardening wagon, threw the bag in it, and hurried back to Henry Remus’s body.
I led Lizzy around the van, to the side where we would be hidden from the street. As I helped her into a set of old sweats that I keep in the White Whale, I kept an eye on the pathway through the van’s windows. When Lizzy was dressed, she clutched my left arm and we stood guard together, leaning against the van and gazing across the street to where the path connected to the road. A few cars rolled past us on their way home from the Observatory, but no one went near the path to the little picnic area. Maybe five minutes later Jesse was back, walking briskly with Henry Remus’s corpse in the big garden wagon behind him. I held up a hand for him to stop, and then peered right and left, up and down, the road. No one in sight. I waved him on. He climbed into the van and stashed the body in the built-in freezer compartment in the very back. “Did you use the whole bag of dirt?” I asked Jesse, worried. If it hadn’t been for my knee, I’d have gone back and made sure the crime scene was covered up to my satisfaction.
“Yes,” he said shortly. “And I dumped out some water and ketchup and left the empty ketchup bottle. It’ll look like picnic leftovers.”
We got Lizzy settled just behind the passenger door, and Shadow moved over to hug the opposite wall of the van in response, as if she understood that Lizzy needed space. There was just enough room to squeeze the gardening wagon in sideways between them. As we pulled away from the park, I called Will on my cell phone. “It’s done,” I told him. “We’re on the move.”
After Will, I called Dashiell and gave him the same update. Then I dialed Noah, since Jesse was driving. He was just returning from a run. “Yeah, I got it,” he said breathlessly. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get authentic shit like that on a moment’s notice?”
We spent the next two hours driving from one part of the city to another. We swung by Jesse’s parents’ house to pick up a bag from Noah, and then went back to Huntington Park. Then we went north, up to Pasadena, where Hayne met me on the back of Dashiell’s property. “You sure you’re okay with this?” Jesse asked me, as he followed Hayne’s waving hand into a parking spot near a little detached garage.
I looked at Shadow, still curled in the back. It wasn’t her fault she’d been turned into a weapon. But she wasn’t mine. I couldn’t decide her fate any more than I could decide the fate of Jesse’s gun. “I have to be,” I said simply.
Hayne walked up to my window, and I pushed the button to roll it down. “Hey,” he said. “We’ve got a space all ready.”
“I can take care of this,” Jesse said to me, unbuckling his seat belt. But I shook my head.
“I’ll stay by the van, for Lizzy. But I want to say good-bye.”
We both got out, and Jesse got Shadow out of the back of the van. The bargest stepped out as gracefully as ever, still coated with drying blood. Hayne whistled, very unprofessionally. “That is one ugly dog,” he said admiringly.
Jesse walked Shadow over to me, and I awkwardly crouched down and cupped her face with my hands, ignoring the blood on her muzzle. I pressed my forehead against hers for a moment. “You are a good girl,” I said meaningfully. A couple of tears trickled from my eyes, but I just ignored them. I didn’t care anymore. I gave Shadow a little scratch on the neck again. “Good girl. Go on.”
When I looked up, Hayne’s face had softened. He handed me a handkerchief, and I wiped off the blood on my hands.