“Christy appealed to us for protection from you,” I told him steadily. “If you know where she ran, if you know where I work, then you know what Adam is. We granted her protection, Adam and I and the whole pack. She doesn’t belong to you, she belongs to us. She never belongedto you. You need to leave. If you leave right now, my mate won’t kill you where you stand.”
“I don’t want to cause trouble,” he said, and he lied. His dog took a step forward.
I had the big gun out and aimed before the dog took another step.
“I might regret shooting the dog, but I won’t hesitate,” I told Flores.
He did something with his hand, and the big dog stepped back. The air‑conditioning kicked in, and the air blew past them and to my nose, bringing with it the faint scent of magic. A faint scent that altered everything because I’d smelled that scent yesterday while I stared at a dead woman in a hayfield. I fought to keep my expression from changing and angled my face a little to the camera.
“You caused a lot of trouble in Finley,” I said, knowing the powerful little lens would catch my lips. Someone would figure out what I had said because there was not a chance in hell that I was coming out of this alive unless Tad or Adam made it here in time. “I saw what you did. Enjoy horsemeat, do you?”
A puzzled look crossed his face as if he were going to deny knowing what I was talking about … and then he smiled. His body language changed as he straightened, like an actor shedding a role. He licked his lips. “Horsemeat is not my first choice, no, but it sufficed at the time.” He liked to talk with his hands. “He understands the message I left in that field, your husband, does he not? I do not recognize his territory, and I hunt freely therein. He has taken she who is mine, so I shall take from him she who is his. Balance. Only then will I take his life–and that is vengeance. There is no one safe from my–”
I shot the dog. A clean killing shot to his head. He dropped without a sound. Alive one moment, dead the next.
Flores staggered back a few steps, clutching his chest almost as if I’d shot him there instead of his dog. He twisted to look at the dog, then turned to me, crouching a little with rage in his face. “You dare.”
“Your fault,” I said coolly, aiming steadily at him and not looking at the poor dog. “You signaled, and he gathered himself for attack. I warned you.”
“My children are immortal,” he told me in a breathless hiss and with theatrics that belonged onstage rather than in the mundane environment of my garage. Christy had been right, there was something European in his accent, but not anything I’d heard before. Vaguely Latinish, maybe, but not any Hispanic accent I was familiar with. The accent added melodrama to his already melodramatic words. “Tied to flesh that can be killed, but that mortal flesh is easily replaced. My son will not die but rise again, and so your efforts to defeat me and mine fail. Even so, you will suffer for this before you die.”
“Your children are immortal?” I asked, repeating the important part of his words for the camera to catch. The first security system had had sound, but when Adam had updated, he’d traded sound for better video. “Tied to mortal flesh. Who are you?”
“Guayota,” he said.
“Coyote?” I asked, and I know my eyes widened. He wasn’t Coyote.
“Guayota,” he said again, and I heard once more the odd pronunciation that Gary Laughingdog had used in the middle of his vision. Not Coyote with a weird accent but another name altogether.
“With a ‘g,’” I said.
But Flores, who called himself Guayota, was done listening to me. “Your husband thinks to keep the sun from me,” he said. “He will regret it.”
Something happened, something that smelled of scorched fabric and magic. I cried out as that heat seared my cheek. But even as the pain made my eyes water, I shot.
I aimed at Flores’s face, and I kept firing until the bullets were gone. Holes appeared in his face as I shot, two side by side in the middle of his forehead, one in his cheekbone. Then I switched targets and two more holes opened up around his heart, the final one a little low and right.
Out of bullets, I grabbed a big wrench and made a backward hop onto the hood of the Passat. It rocked a little under my weight, and I thought that I’d have to remember to tell the owner that it needed work on the shocks, too. Another hop put me on the roof of the car and gave me a little space.
The bullets had knocked Flores back. He hit a rack of miscellaneous parts and sent it crashing to the floor. Flores bounced off the rack, almost followed it to the ground, but caught his balance at the last instant. I felt a cold chill because with three bullets in his face and two in the chest, he caught his balance and stayed on his feet.
A funny sound filled the garage; it made my throat hurt and buzzed my ears. He was laughing. A cold, hard knot in my belly told me that probably someone else was going to have to deal with the shocks on the Passat.
My shoes were soft‑soled and so had no trouble sticking to the top of the Passat. The gun was of no more use except as a club, but I kept it in my left hand and kept the wrench in my right.
I didn’t have much of a chance, but that didn’t mean I was going to roll over and give the thing my throat. Adam was coming, and the camera was rolling. Even assuming he killed me, the longer I held out, the more information they’d glean from the recording.
Flores’s face changed as he laughed, flowing and darkening, but beneath the darkness, visible in cracks in his skin, was a sullen red light. My changes are almost instantaneous, the werewolves take a lot longer than that with the exception of Charles. But none of us glowed.
Flores … Guayota moved his hand, still laughing, and something flew at me. I dodged, but it slid over my shirt, which caught fire, and landed on top of the Passat.
A quick brush of my hands put my shirt out, leaving me with blisters on the skin along my collarbone and a hole in my bra strap. I slid back one step to see what he’d thrown at me without having to look away from him.
It was about the size of a finger, blackened and oozing on one end. I chanced a quick glance and realized that not only was it the size of a finger, it had a fingernail. I almost nudged it with my foot to be sure, but the paint was blackening and bubbling up around it, and directly underneath it, the metal was sagging.
I’d read an account written by a Civil War commander about how he’d seen the cannonball coming toward one of his men who was wounded and down. It had been coming so slowly, and he’d just reached down to deflect it–and had lost his arm.
I didn’t touch it.
Guayota had a distance weapon, however weirdly horrible, and that meant keeping back from him was no good. Time enough later to wonder at the finger and how he’d made it so hot it could melt the roof of the car; for now I had to concentrate on survival. Nor could I follow my sensei’s first rule of fighting–he who is smart and runs away lives to fight another day. The bay doors were closed, and I had no way to run.
Out of other options, I attacked. There had been no more than a fraction of a second between when he threw the finger and when I jumped off the car. His burning finger meant that I knew better than to touch him with my skin. The wrench I’d grabbed was a giant‑sized 32mm; it weighed about three pounds and gave me almost two feet of additional reach.
I got four hits on him, three with the wrench and one with the gun, and in that time, I learned a lot about him. He wasn’t used to his prey knowing how to fight back. He had never been trained to fight hand‑to‑hand. He was slower than I was. Not much slower, but it was enough for me to get in four hits. He was oddly sticky, and I lost the gun to him when it sank into his flesh to be quickly consumed and absorbed.