June’s crying jag had left her eyes red and puffy. The matronly saleswoman looked at her kindly as she approached the counter. “Dear, are you all right?”
June had prepared herself for this question with several variations on the truth. “I just broke up with the most awful man,” she said. “He made it so difficult. I practically had to jump out of his car to get away.”
“Oh, honey,” said the older woman, with such profound sympathy that June knew she had chosen the right way to tell the story. “Men are such complete fuckers, aren’t they?”
“I’m done with them,” June said, pulling out her credit card. “Completely done.”
“Like a fish needs a bicycle,” said the saleswoman with a secret smile as she rang up June’s purchases. “Honey, what kind of bag would you like?”
“You know, I think I’ll just wear them,” said June. “Can I ask a favor? To tell you the truth, I’m a little afraid he’s outside right now. I really don’t want to run into him. Would it be all right if I went out the back?”
She found an old mountain bike leaning unlocked against a railing, a gift fallen into her lap. She told herself she’d somehow get the bike back to the owner, knowing even then that it was a lie, and rode off just managing not to look over her shoulder.
At her mother’s house, another official-looking black SUV squatted at the curb. June just kept pedaling. Luckily, her mom’s car had blocked the driveway, June had never found the keys, and she’d had to park her old Subaru wagon around the corner.
She checked to see if her own keys were still in her bag, along with the rest of her professional existence. Notebook computer in a padded sleeve, phone, notepad, pens. She never left home without them.
She leaned the bike against a low fence, got in her car, and drove quietly away.
Where she was going, she had no idea.
1
When he rounded the curve on the narrow trail and saw the bear, Peter Ash was thinking about robbing a liquor store. Or a gas station, he was weighing his options.
On foot with a pack on his back, he was as deep into old-growth redwood country as he could get. Although most of the original giants had been logged off decades before, there were still a few decent-sized protected areas along the California coast, with enough steep, tangled acreage to get truly lost. In the deep, damp drainage bottoms thick with underbrush, redwood trunks fifteen feet in diameter shot up into the mist like gnarled columns holding up the sky.
But Peter hadn’t counted on the coastal fog. It had been constant for days. He couldn’t see more than a hundred feet in any direction, and it made the white static crackle and spark in the back of his head.
It was the static that made him want to rob a liquor store.
The closest one was at least a few days’ walk ahead of him, so the plan was still purely theoretical. But he was putting the pieces together in his mind.
He didn’t want to use a weapon, because he was pretty sure armed robbery carried a longer sentence than he was willing to take. He didn’t want to go to actual prison, just the local jail, and only for a few days. He’d settle for overnight. Although how he’d try to rob a liquor store without a visible weapon was a problem he hadn’t yet solved.
He could put his hand inside a paper bag and pretend to be holding a gun. He’d probably have to hold something, to make it more realistic. Maybe a banana?
Hell, now he was just embarrassing himself.
Any respectable liquor store employee would just laugh at him. Hopefully they’d still call the cops, who would put him in the back of a squad car, then at least a holding cell. Maybe overnight, maybe for a few days. It was a calculated risk.
The problem was these woods. They were so dense and dark, and the coastal cloud cover so thick and low, that he hadn’t seen the sky for weeks. The white static wouldn’t leave him alone, even out here, miles from so-called civilization. It pissed him off. He’d wanted to walk in this ancient forest for years. Now he was here in this green paradise and he couldn’t enjoy it.
Peter Ash was tall and rangy, muscle and bone, nothing extra. His long face was angular, the tips of his ears slightly pointed, his dark hair an unruly shag. He had wide, knuckly hands and the thoughtful eyes of a werewolf a week before the change. Some part of him was always in motion—even now, hiking in the woods, his fingertips twitched in time to some interior metronome that never ceased.
He’d been a Marine lieutenant in Iraq and Afghanistan, eight years and more deployments than he cared to remember. Boots on the ground, tip of the spear. He’d finished with his war two years before, but the war still wasn’t finished with him. It had left him with a souvenir. He called it the white static, an oddball form of post-traumatic stress that showed up as claustrophobia, an intense reaction to enclosed spaces.