The bitterness of failure clotted Rosa’s throat. “I fear so. Where’s Brick?”
“Badly wounded. Jolene’s with him. I don’t know if he’ll make it. Where’s the doc?”
“I don’t know.”
Uncertainty gnawed at her for the first time. She had done an impractical thing, banishing medical care so fast. If she cared about Valle as much as she claimed, she needed to do what was best for the town. Brick needed a doctor.
Maybe I should look for him. Once he patches up the wounded, he can move on. I can watch him and keep his awful secret.
Even if the thought made her sick.
“I’ll keep an eye out for him,” Jameson said quietly.
“Where’s Wicker?”
In silent answer, he pointed to the pile.
Oh, no.
The old man had done precisely as she’d asked him not to—and died a hero. As had Viv. With half of the town’s elders gone, Rosa felt unaccountably adrift, no longer sure of her moorings or her course. But that wasn’t the way a leader thought. She couldn’t show weakness in the wake of the worst disaster Valle had faced. They needed authority and a sense that someone knew what to do now, even though she wanted only to weep and mourn.
“It’s a terrible morning,” Jameson said.
Rosa had no rebuttal. Apart from the day her brother died, she’d never known worse.
“And the news gets worse,” he went on. “Lem’s missing. I can’t find his body.”
Qué raro.
She’d never heard of dust pirates taking male captives, but she supposed some of them might like variety in their torture and mayhem. Poor Lem.
Ex strode into sight, strapped to the teeth with weapons. He bristled with guns and knives, his face tight with rage. “The living need us more than the dead. When are we going to kill these bastards?”
Rosa breathed past the hot weight in her chest. The girls would be abused, raped, maybe even tortured. She knew that. But she also knew that running off in pursuit without regrouping and a solid plan would only destroy what remained of the bravos. The line between waiting and action was sharp enough to kill.
“We’re not ready,” she said. “I want to raid the emergency stores, and I want our dead burned before the desert animals come for them. They deserve that much respect.” She hooked a thumb toward the pile of dead raiders. “And I want those stinking corpses out of our town.”
Ex snarled something fierce and riddled with pain. “What about the girls?”
Rosa’s heart tightened. Even now, even in the midst of his anger, he deferred to her leadership. Only, for the first time, she wondered if that respect was warranted.
“We’ll leave off until evening, with patrols to locate their camp. They couldn’t have covered their tracks so well when dragging the women along too. Our cover will be better by darkness, and we can hope Peltz celebrates with strong drink.” She looked Ex in the eye. “And then we’ll cut every one of their goddamn throats.”
THIRTY-SIX
Chris awakened in the late afternoon. He blinked in the shadows of a rock overhang but couldn’t remember taking shelter there. He sat up. The taste in his mouth was rank and strong, all coppery tang. He was naked still, the blanket tangled around his feet.
The remains of a dead jackrabbit lay next to him.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
He turned away from the fresh kill and tugged the blanket around his shoulders. The rock was cool against his bare skin, but his shiver had nothing to do with the elements. Some part of him was going to have to give. He could either accept what he was, or he could go mad.
But to accept that he could transform into a goddamn leopard?
Fingers clenched tightly in his hair, he rocked forward. The whole thing was just
wrong
. So wrong.
And yet even now, he knew the satisfaction of having hunted for his sustenance. His belly was full. For the moment that was enough.
He recalled that he and Jenna had once speculated about the number of calories such a transformation would burn. Closing his eyes, he thought back to his friend. She had been radically altered by her first shift, somehow more feral, more in tune with the other side of her nature. Chris found himself caught between wanting that blissful resignation and wanting to lock the animal away forever.
A rustling sound in the distance caught his attention. A gopher, four hundred meters. And there, another one—a hawk landing on the arm of a saguaro.
There’s no locking that away.
He might deny it for the rest of his days, but that wouldn’t negate what he had become. The new primal surge in his blood was nothing he could ignore.
Stretching, he stood and surveyed the valley. Memories of that afternoon’s hunt fused with his waking mind as he recognized where he’d taken down the jackrabbit. He concentrated, realizing that the time had not been lost. He remembered all of it. The waiting. The stillness. The final leap toward a victory that would fill his stomach. Those memories had no words and no self-awareness, just the elemental demand of the moment, propelled by instinct.
Oddly . . . freeing.
With the blanket around his shoulders, he stepped into the waning sunlight. Sight, although still useful, took a backseat to what he could hear and smell. He gave himself over to the new weapons at his disposal, realizing that he’d traveled far during his hunt. He was a long way from Valle.
What the hell is that stink?
A few minutes later he topped a high ridge that overlooked a ravine. The dust pirates in all their putrid horror had made camp down below.
Chris didn’t need his sight for much longer than a few seconds, quickly assessing the camp’s layout. Then he hunched close to the concealed rock face and listened. Cat met human as he paired his animal senses with mathematics and logic. Only when he identified the sounds of a woman being raped did he shake free of his trance. He was thankful he couldn’t tell which of the girls was being abused. It already felt like an intrusion.
Instinct urged him to shift. He felt the gathering fuzziness and pain edging into his human consciousness. Fighting back, he held the impulse at bay. He didn’t want to shift out of anger and the need for spontaneous revenge. He was just one person. And the bravos wanted their revenge too.
The sun had set when he arrived in Valle. The explosion along the defensive wall meant he could have slunk into town without being noticed, but he used the front gate. A bravo named Hector stood watch, his face bleak and his eyes sunken.
“Doc,” he breathed. “Holy damn, is it good to see you. Where . . . ? Oh, man, your clothes.”
“Where’s Rosa?”
“
La taberna
. Making plans and trying to keep Ex and Rio sane. The raiders got Allison and Singer.”
“Shit. Brick too, then, yeah?”
“No, man,” Hector said, shaking his head. “Brick’s a mess. Took a shotgun blast to the chest.”
Chris offered nothing else as he walked through the damaged gate, but Hector touched his shoulder.
“You are going to help, right?”
A cynical smile could not be helped. “If I’m allowed.”
He left Hector looking tired and quizzical. The town stank of singed, wet wood, incinerated flesh, and spent gunpowder. Chris had thought the smell strong before, but now it was nearly overpowering to his supercharged senses. He concentrated on slipping into his room above the general store and retrieving a change of clothes. After a quick wash to get the smell of death off his skin, he dressed and made his way to the tavern.
Angry voices obscured his arrival. He peered through the cracked door, waiting.
“We should’ve gone hours ago,” Ex snarled. His pacing was twitchy and tight. “When are the patrols due back? Do you have any doubt what’s happening to those girls right now?”
“I have no doubt.” Rosa sat at a table by herself, an untouched plate of food at her elbow. Chris wondered briefly who’d prepared it, now that Viv was dead. “They’re being used, Ex. Used like a weapon or a shirt or a tire. A commodity. But that means they have value, too.”
“For how long?”
“That will protect them,” Rosa said, as if she hadn’t heard him.
Rio was quiet at a table next to Rosa’s, his attention fixed on cleaning his rifle. His posture rippled with barely leashed anger. “She won’t be a virgin anymore.” When he looked up at Rosa, his features were stripped of any vestiges of youth. “Singer, I mean. She won’t be.”
“Maybe not,” Rosa said quietly. “But she will live, and we’ll make her well again.”
“You can’t be sure of that. You don’t even know where the doc is.”
Falco sat on the bar, his feet dangling over the edge, heels tapping against the metal leg of a barstool. “Yeah, and you don’t seem too frantic about that,
Jefa
. Woulda thought him being missing might mean more to you.”
Rosa’s back looked painfully stiff. “I don’t know where he is.”
“Maybe he turned traitor, eh? Maybe all this time he was setting you up for a day like this. You think of that?”
“He’s no traitor,” she said.
That much, at least, should have given Chris some measure of satisfaction. But he couldn’t muster the energy.
“I’m not convinced,” Falco said.
Chris pushed the door fully open, his hands raised in preemptive surrender. “I’m here. And Rosa’s right. I’m no traitor.”
Falco scowled but restrained any comment. Maybe he saw this as the ultimate opportunity to let Chris be the architect of his own undoing.
“Where were you?” asked Ex.
No suspicion there. Good. Chris needed to know how many bravos could be depended upon for a counterattack.
Rosa had yet to look at him.
“I was here,” Chris said. “I helped Wicker first. Did he live?” Downcast faces were his reply. A place near his heart shuddered, bursting with new grief. He exhaled and pushed it away. “I killed three men in the town hall. Then I left.”
Falco laughed scornfully. “Mark of a true bravo, eh?”
“Rosa told me to go.”
Incredulous voices asked questions all at once. Chris bridged the distance between the doorway and Rosa’s table. He pulled up a chair and sat beside her. The scent of her was much stronger than he recalled. God, the
need
in him was stronger too. More forceful. Less . . . human.
She was still his woman.
But he would leave Valle forever if she told him to go. He couldn’t stay if she wasn’t his to claim, to trust, to love. No matter how much Chris wanted to stay, Rosa Cortez was his last link to humanity. He wouldn’t settle again.
“Are you going to tell them,” he asked under his breath, “or should I?”
“I told you to stay gone.”
“That was hours ago.” He leaned back in the chair. “Before I knew where Peltz is camped.”
She looked at him then. Her dark eyes, stripped of their usual bright determination, held a blasted, haunted emptiness. She had lost so much. The choice would be hers as to whether she lost him too. But even as he thought it, he knew she wouldn’t back down from her hatred of skinwalkers. And frankly, so disturbed by what he’d become, he could hardly blame her.
“I didn’t lie to you, Rosita. I didn’t know. Tell me you believe that.”
“What’s he talking about?” Rio asked. “We deserve to know, Rosa.”
She blinked. Chris couldn’t remember the last time, if ever, Rio had called her by her given name. He was always the most loyal, always the one to defer to her guidance.
She took a deep breath. “Chris is a skinwalker.”
Falco pulled a gun, his expression a nonverbal
I told you so.
Ex showed no reaction at all, his expression inscrutable.
Rio slumped in his seat. “Well . . . good. I mean—you can help us get those bastards.”
“Rio,” Rosa said with a warning tone. “He’s leaving. He’s nothing more to us than that family. People to send on their way.”
“Bullshit.”
“Watch your language with me,” she said, pushing away from the table.
Jameson had been so quiet and still that even Chris hadn’t noticed him. “You killed that big fella, didn’t you?” he said softly. “The one in town hall?”
Chris nodded.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” The neutral tone of his voice left Chris wondering if Jameson’s admiration or suspicion held more sway.
Rio appeared older as he assessed Chris. “Can you change at will? How does it work?”
“Don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “The impulse comes over me, like the need to sleep. I can choose to give in or fight back.”
In what struck Chris as a deliberate dig, Rosa had decided to stand next to Falco at the bar. “You’ve shifted again, haven’t you? Since leaving?”
“I was hungry,” he said simply.
Rosa crossed herself.