It wasn’t a nice wood, not like the old forest in the game preserve near the Fairfax compound. It was a scrubby, dank wood. We picked our way along the trail until we’d gone far enough that the house behind us was hidden from view, and Cody called for a halt.
“Here?” I asked.
He shrugged, removing his off-duty shoulder holster and stripping off his T-shirt. “It’s as good a place as any.”
If I’d thought about it, which I would have if I weren’t so ungodly hungover, I would have realized that asking Cody to shift meant asking Cody to get naked first. And I probably would have imagined a scenario in which he asked Jen and me to turn our backs or look away for modesty’s sake.
I would have been wrong.
Cody took off his clothes with an utter lack of self-consciousness that gave me a brief flash of insight into werewolves’ relationship with their own physicality. And yes, he looked very good naked, all lean, hard muscle and sinew, not hairy except for that treasure trail leading down from his belly toward even more tempting parts, which I commended myself for not checking out.
Folding his briefs, he placed them carefully atop a stack of clothing on a fallen tree trunk. “You’ve got something for the scent?” he asked Jen.
She nodded, wide-eyed, fishing a boy’s worn and misshapen sweat sock out of her pocket. “Here.”
Iridescent green flashed behind Cody’s eyes. “Hold on to it for me.”
Jen nodded again, wordless.
Cody shifted.
It wasn’t like in the movies, with bones straining, flesh melting, and sinews cracking. I thought it would be, having caught a glimpse of Cody’s self-control faltering when Al attacked me. But this was a deliberate and controlled transition, swift and flawless. One form flowed into another.
One second, naked man. There was the quickest image of him dropping to all fours, his skin pale in the dappled morning light.
The next second, wolf. And I do mean wolf.
Long and rangy in the limb, lean-sided, with tawny-gray fur, a long muzzle full of teeth, and prick-pointed ears. There was nothing human looking out of those amber eyes, but there was intelligence, keen and alert and waiting.
“Show him the sock,” I whispered to Jen.
“You show him the sock!” she whispered back, shoving it at me.
Reluctantly, I took it from her and held it out toward wolf-Cody, letting it dangle from my hand. “Find Brandon?”
The wolf sniffed the sock, crescent-shaped nostrils working, then turned tail and sniffed the ground. It set off down the trail at a steady trot that didn’t look particularly fast, but was. In seconds, it was out of sight.
Clearly, I hadn’t really thought this through.
Jen and I followed at a run, at least until we ran out of trail. Luckily, the wolf had paused to let us catch up to it before it darted into the underbrush. From then on, it got pretty pathetic. We crashed through branches and blundered under them, tripped over vines, squeezed past brambly, thorny bushes. The sun was climbing higher and it promised to be a hot day. I could almost smell the beer and scotch sweating out of my pores, which made me feel even more nauseated.
“God, I really need to join a gym or something,” Jen muttered between gasps. “Do you see him?”
“No.” Straining my eyes, I caught a flicker of tawny movement ahead. “Yeah. Up there.”
“It thins out ahead,” she said. “But it gets grosser.”
“I remember.” When Jen and I had been younger and stupider, we’d explored back here, too. That was how we knew about Meg Mucklebones, although we’d been careful to keep our distance. “Jen, you really need to think about moving out and getting your own place.”
“I know, I know! It’s just—”
“You worry about your mom and Brandon,” I finished for her. “I know.”
She sighed. “Sucks to be me, huh?”
Reaching back, I found her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Yeah, it does.”
After that, we saved our breath for the effort of clambering through the scrub. Once it thinned out, it did indeed get grosser, the damp ground turning to gray muck filled with decaying foliage. It reeked of rotting vegetation and threatened to pull my cute little strappy sandals right off my feet. Thank God at least they were flats. Dead or dying trees rose out of the muck, and clouds of mosquitoes hovered whining over puddles of stagnant water.
“Hang on.” I halted, panting, and took the opportunity to bend over and tug the heel straps of my sandals in place. “Lost him again.”
“You’re not exactly dressed for this, are you?” Jen commented, pushing her dark hair back.
“Didn’t exactly plan on it.” Straightening, I scanned the bleak landscape for a glimpse of the wolf.
“Oh, my God!” She gave me a smack on the shoulder. “Daisy Johanssen, is this a walk-of-shame morning? Is this about that ghoul you mentioned?”
I shook my head, which wasn’t a particularly good idea, as it set off a wave of dizziness. “I wish.” Oh, I did, did I? Huh. That had certainly come out of my mouth without any conscious thought on my part. “No, I spent the night at Lurine’s.”
“Well, how very fabulous of you.” There was a slight note of envy in Jen’s voice. “Was there champagne and caviar?”
“No,” I said. “Beer and pretzels. Hold on; be quiet a moment. I think I hear something.”
She fell silent.
Both of us strained our ears until we heard it in the distance: a sound like the screech of tree limbs rubbing together. If you’d never heard it before, you might think that was all it was. But it was a still morning, not a breath of a breeze stirring over the marshy wood. And Jen and I had heard it before.
We exchanged a glance.
“Oh, crap,” I said.
Jen swallowed. “It’s her.”
We set out at a run across the gray muck, splashing and slipping and floundering. I lost one sandal and then the other, abandoned both of them, and hoped there weren’t any nasty, splintery bits of wood underfoot.
On the verge of a scummy pond covered with bright green algae and choked with weeds, I caught sight of the wolf hunkered down beneath a deadfall and skidded to a halt, my bare feet plowing through the mud, Jen stumbling into me from behind. The wolf-Cody glanced up at me, that inhuman intelligence in its eyes.
Beyond it . . .
Meg Mucklebones was even bigger than I remembered, towering above the pond, green, slimy skin stretched over a frame that looked like it had been built of twisted roots. Long, veiny arms reached impotently for her prey, her voice creaking and screeching. A mere foot beyond her grasp, eleven-year-old Brandon Cassopolis clung like a terrified spider monkey to the trunk of a dead pine tree jutting out of the pond, arms and legs wrapped around it, his eyes squeezed tightly closed.
“How did he—” I saw a second barren pine trunk angled across the pond, caught in the branches of Brandon’s perch. “Oh, crap.”
Jen shuddered. “Daise?”
A policeman with a gun would have been helpful right about now. A wolf, not so much. I was pretty sure wolves could swim if they had to, and pretty sure they weren’t at their fighting best when they did. But without the wolf, we wouldn’t have found Brandon.
I really, really hadn’t thought this through.
I glanced down at wolf-Cody. “If you can understand me, now would be a good time to go back for your gun.”
Apparently he could, since he shot out from beneath the deadfall and headed back across the muck at a rapid pace.
In the center of the pond, the marsh hag abandoned her futile effort to reach Brandon and wrapped both massive, long-fingered claws around the trunk of the upright pine tree. Brittle wood screeched and splintered alarmingly as she tugged on it, sounding a lot like the marsh hag herself.
“Daise!” Jen’s voice was high and tight with panic.
“Okay. Okay!” I reached for dauda-dagr’s hilt and drew it. It felt cold against my palm, but in a good way. The dagger cleared the scabbard with a faint singing sound. “Hey! Hey, Meg! Or Jenny, or whatever your name is! Over here!”
She turned, dripping and oozing, looming up into the morning sky. Her sunken gaze found me.
I held up my left hand, showing her Hel’s rune. “You’re out of line, bitch! Let the boy go.”
It took a moment to identify the rhythmic creaking sound as laughter. The marsh hag bent toward me, baring a mouthful of hideously pointed teeth and a disturbingly withered tongue. “I am within my rights!” she rasped at me. “The boy ventured into my territory knowingly! It has happened many times. Many times! Again and again, he has trespassed. This time, I have caught him.” She gestured at Brandon with one slimy, taloned claw. “That makes him my rightful prey, Hel’s liaison.” Her voice dropped to a low, slithering, contemptuous tone. “Do you dispute it?”
It made me angry.
Seriously angry.
And this time I didn’t try to contain it. I didn’t even think about the Seven Deadlies. I let it rise, the air pressure tightening around me, pressing on my eardrums, my hair lifting with static electricity. Nearby trees made whining, cracking sounds, residual sap heating and bursting the bark. “You’re damn right I do,” I said grimly. I didn’t know if she was telling the truth or not, and I didn’t care. “Pemkowet can’t afford this. Not now.”
She screeched.
It was an earsplitting, soul-shaking sound, and I still didn’t care because I was pissed off. I was sick and tired of being lied to by sociopathic bartenders and megalomaniac frat boys, sick and tired of being torn between friendship and the eldritch code, sick and tired of the eternal balancing act that was my life.
“You want a piece of this?” I beckoned with dauda-dagr. “Come and get it.”
Meg Mucklebones lunged at me.
Jen screamed.
But I was already in motion, scrambling up the angled length of the fallen pine tree, the bark rough and scaly beneath my bare feet.
And the world . . . changed.