“Again with the darlin’?” But something like longing or hunger flowed through me and I dropped onto the bed, grinning foolishly into the dark. Rick was coming. Maybe I should have gotten nonconnecting rooms. Not that there would be any actual sex—not with the possibility of me getting the were-taint as a really bad, incurable, untreatable STD—but maybe I should have gotten nonconnecting rooms anyway. Just in case.
I texted back, I may not be me. Fair warning. Rick was a were. He’d figure it out.
Several minutes later he texted to me. Noted. Which made me happy all over for reasons I didn’t understand.
Eli knocked on my door, one tap. That was all. One. Mr. Minimalist. “Come.” Who says I can’t do terse?
Eli entered, geared up for the day, a bulge under his arm visible as he entered, another in the back of his shirt, both of which were nine-millimeter semiautomatics. I knew he’d have more weapons on—a silver-plated knife or two and a few stakes. All that just to greet the dawn. Eli, a minimalist in all other ways, was not into austerity where weapons were concerned. In his hand was my fetish box. He put it on the bed beside me, and for once was unable to keep his curiosity off his face.
Feeling a little uncertain, because I’d never done this in front of him before, I opened the box and rummaged around inside, finally pulling out a short necklace strung with glass beads and wired with canine teeth and three largish bones. I knew what almost all my necklaces were, animal-wise, but some I didn’t use often, and this one I had never used.
Trying to sound offhand, Eli said, “You’re gonna track in animal form?”
My eyes on the bones, I nodded, letting a small smile form. I said, “Think you can find the most recent sighting place?”
“Does a mountain lion scream in the woods?”
I smiled wider without looking at him. “Loud. Even if no one is there. And yeah. Animal form. One with a good nose and who can swim.”
“In gator-infested waters?” He sounded half-teasing, half-appalled.
I chuckled softly. “Most gators are hibernating. Water’s still too cold for them to feed.” I looked up under my eyebrows. “Sarge told me. Anyway, swimming is only important if I really need it.”
“And?” The word was phrased the way he must have spoken in the Rangers, sharp and cutting and demanding of more than just an answer.
“Newfoundland,” I said. “I have the bones of a huge black Newfoundland, two years old, who was in training to work with an SAR team because of her swimming ability and because she had an air nose.”
Eli grunted. “Change in here or the Kid will want to watch. I’ll go get some protein.” He left, closing the door behind him. He hadn’t asked about the air nose comment, because he knew what it meant.
Some dogs track on the ground. Others over water. Yet others—some very special few others—can track through the air, sometimes for miles. They were the wunderkinds of tracking dogs as far as I was concerned.
I stripped and put the folded clothes into the bag. It was bright pink with big flowers in hot pink, red, and fuchsia, with green leaves on it. Peonies maybe. The zippered duffel had been a gag gift from the Kid, who expected me to retch and throw it away. Instead I’d brought it on two other jobs. And Eli made him carry it while we both cooed about how cute he looked. Mean? Yeah. Probably. But turnabout’s fair play had been fun.
Naked, sitting guru-style, I adjusted the length of my doubled gold chain around my neck. On it was wired a gold nugget from the first place I’d changed after I left Bethel Nondenominational Christian Children’s Home when I was eighteen, and a tooth from the biggest mountain lion I’d ever seen. It was a sort of safety tool, a last-ditch survivor device. If I got killed, and if I had time between my last heartbeat and death, I could change into my Beast form and maybe live. It had saved me a couple of times already, and I went nowhere without it.
I propped a pillow behind me, got comfy on the bed, and dropped into the place of the change. Once upon a time, and not that far in the past, changing into a different shape had been much more difficult. I’d had to calm my heart rate and breathing, meditate, really work at it. Now—maybe because of the times I’d changed in extremis, which could also be called near-death experiences—I could drop into the place of gray energies much faster.
My magic was some active form of quantum mechanics, but I wasn’t smart enough to understand it. I just knew how to use it in the same way I could turn a light on without knowing how electricity worked. I held the fetish necklace in both hands as my breathing evened out; I again dropped into the gray place of the change.
I sank deep into the bones and teeth and marrow of the Newfoundland, finding the snake that lives in the heart of all animal cells, the double helix of DNA that skinwalkers knew about and knew how to use long before the human medical research community discovered it.
I let myself flow into the genetic makeup of the dog that had died saving its trainer from an attacker, shot before she could ever use the training she was getting to save more lives. My skinwalker energies rose. Pain shocked through me, sharp as a knife blade slicing along my bones. I sucked in a final breath and . . . changed.