She gave me a tentative smile. “His mother never lets anyone forget it. She’s a proud woman, and she swears that not only were they Canarios, but her family actually was Guanche, descended from the original inhabitants of the islands before Spain conquered it about seven hundred years ago.” Her smile broadened. “She talks about moving back there someday. I really hope that she does. We could vacation in the tropics and also see her less often. Win-win in my book.”
“We should get out of here,” said Gary, looking at the framed flag and sounding nervous. He looked at Lucia and seemed to collect himself. “Ma’am, Mercy brought us here because she is worried that Christy’s stalker might be after you because you helped her.”
“That’s pretty far-fetched,” said Lucia.
Adam looked at Gary, and said, “Why don’t we take you to dinner and tell you some tall tales and you can decide if you want to believe us or not? You pick the restaurant, take your own car, and leave a message for your husband. I think that we might all be easier in a more neutral location.”
She looked at Adam, because people just do. Humans are not immune to the reassurance that he brings with him like an invisible cloak; part of it is being Alpha, and part of it is just Adam.
“I think,” my husband said, giving the Lone Star flag a thoughtful look, “going out might be a very good idea.”
She led the way to a family-style Mexican restaurant off Highway 395 where there were lots of people even at nine at night. No one said anything until we’d all ordered and the waiter had brought out drinks.
Gary shot a glance at me, to see if I wanted to start. I took a chip and dipped it into salsa and gave Adam a look. If Adam told her, she’d probably believe him. It was the air of authority and no nonsense. He raised an eyebrow, and I nodded at him.
“You tell her,” I said. “You’re good at making this kind of stuff make sense.”
So while I ate chips like I hadn’t eaten in days—which was sort of true—Adam told Lucia how Christy’s stalker boyfriend had broken into my garage and turned into a fiery demon dog from the Canary Islands. He combined the immediate narrative with the story Kyle had told us later and managed to make it sound plausible.
He left out Gary’s jailbreak.
Food came before Adam was finished, and I ate as quickly as I could because I knew that there was a real chance that dinner would be over before I was done eating. She might try to storm out, certain that we were crazy. Or maybe she’d try to go look for Joel immediately. We’d have to stop her, for her own safety—and then there would be other things more urgent than food. Gary was eating the same way I was, maybe for the same reasons.
“So,” she said carefully, “Juan Flores is really a volcanic deity named Guayota who thinks that your ex-wife Christy is—what?—some sort of reincarnation of the sun goddess he captured and raped thousands of years ago?”
“I know, right?” I said, swallowing hastily. “I had that same moment of disbelief. But for me it was when he threw his finger at me, and it burned through the top of the Passat I was standing on.”
She was silent for a moment, looking at the burn on my cheek. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything about the finger, but it kept coming up in my thoughts. I’ve never had a finger thrown at me before. A new-and-improved addition to my creepy-hall-of-fame nightmares.
“And you think that because I helped you a little”—she pinched her thumb and index finger together to show everyone how little—“he will come after me? Because this one”—she indicated Laughingdog with a jerk of her chin—“had a dream?”
“That’s what I thought when Gary told us about his dream,” I told her, setting down my fork. I wasn’t hungry anymore. “That Guayota might have come after you because you helped us. But now I think that because I killed the human one of his tibicenas was tied to, he needs to find another one.” Immortal tibicena tied to a mortal, a mortal who was descended from the land where his volcano had fertilized the soil the people ate from. “I think, if I understand what Guayota is, the spirit of a Canary Islands volcano, that he needed a descendant of the Canary Islands to re-create the physical form of his tibicena. I think that maybe he sought Joel out because his family came from the Canaries, where Guayota originated.”
She hadn’t run away yet. Adam gave me a thoughtful look, a “when did you come up with this” look.
“Maybe he’s coming because you helped us,” I told her. “But you can’t contact Joel, and Guayota is a spirit, a god, demon, or whatever from the Canary Islands. It might be a coincidence. My brother here knows a little about the kinds of spirits that dwell in mountains.”
Gary kept reacting when I claimed him as a relative. I wasn’t sure whether he was happy, unhappy, or just surprised by it. I just ignored him and continued on. “He told us that Guayota needs a connection to his home to function here. I think the dogs are that connection. Now that one of them is dead, he needs a replacement. I think the coincidence was that I came to ask you about the dogs.” Maybe, if there was some kind of deeper connection between Joel and Guayota, maybe it wasn’t such an odd thing that Joel was working with dogs. “I think, I believe, that your husband meets Guayota’s need for a descendant of the islands—and there are probably not a lot of Canary Islanders in the Tri-Cities. I think he’s taken your husband and is forcing him to become one of his tibicenas.”
She paled, pulled out her cell phone, and dialed. Instead of Joel’s voice telling her to leave a message, we all heard the recording advising her that the customer who had the number she dialed was not available. He’d either powered his cell phone off, run it out of battery, or destroyed it.
“We have told you quite a story,” I told Lucia. “I swear to you that the danger is real. If you don’t wish us to keep you safe, I understand. If you don’t believe us, that’s okay, too. But I think you need to find a safe place to be for a few days until we can destroy Guayota.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible,” Laughingdog murmured, and I kicked him under the table even though I didn’t think Lucia had heard.
She put her phone back in her purse with shaking hands. “I live in a city with werewolves and fae. How much more is it to believe in volcano gods?”
She wiped her face, and I saw that she was clearing the skin beneath her eyes. “My dogs like you.” It wasn’t as much of a non sequitur as it sounded like. “I don’t want to believe you. If I believe you, then this … thing has my husband.” She gave me a brief, tight smile, and her voice was raw. “What can I do to help him?”
“We don’t know,” Adam said. “We are working on it. First, we’d like to get you somewhere safe.”
She examined his face, then looked at me. “Okay,” she said. “Let me stop at home and put extra food out for the dogs and get a few things packed. I am going to have to be there in the morning to feed them. Even if I could find someone willing to feed the dogs—and we have a real basket case in the rehab kennel right now—I could not ask anyone to come by if something dangerous might be hunting.”
“Good enough,” said Adam.
The dogs were silent again when we stopped at Lucia and Joel’s home. She’d already gotten out of her car when Adam stopped the SUV behind her. I hopped out to make sure she didn’t go in alone, and that’s when I smelled it.
“Blood,” I said quietly to Adam, and shut the SUV door and sprinted over to Lucia.
“Hold on.” I caught her arm and stopped her about two body lengths from the front door. “Shhh.” I couldn’t hear anything, but he’d been here. Along with the blood, I could smell his magic and a faint, burnt scent like scorched hair.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” I lied, because if she was like Joel, the fact that her dogs were in trouble would mean I’d have to sit on her to keep her out. “We’re going to wait here for Adam. He’s changing, and it’ll take a while, be patient. If I’m panicking for nothing, it won’t matter, but if there’s something here, I’d rather face it
with a werewolf.”
“Changing. You mean changing into a werewolf?”
“That’s right.” Only then did I realize that the reason I knew that was because of our mate bond. He hadn’t said anything to me before I sprinted to Lucia.
“If you want to, you can go wait in your car.” I didn’t think she would, but it was worth trying. In her car, she might have a chance to get away if things went south.
“Is it because your brother is Native American?” she asked.
My eyes were good in the dark, and I was looking so hard they ached, but all I saw were a few bats and a squirrel. It took a moment to realize that I really didn’t have any idea what she was talking about.
“Is what because he is Native American?” I asked.
“Sorry,” she said. “When I’m nervous I forget to say everything out loud. Is he psychic because he is Native American?”
“As far as I know, Native Americans are no more psychic than anyone else,” I told her. “My father, though, he was…” Was what? Coyote? “A bull rider in rodeos, but in his spare time he hunted”—vampires—“demons. He was something of a shaman, and some of that followed his children.”
“You don’t have visions?”
“No.” I turned into a coyote and saw ghosts.
“You speak of him in the past tense,” she said. Lucia asked questions when she was scared, I got that, I did that sometimes, too. More often I talked. Sometimes I laughed. It was better than crying, and it made me look braver than I was.
I nodded. “My father died. The bad guys got him.” Coyote lived. Coyote always lived. The human guise he’d wrapped around himself because he was bored, the man my mother had fallen in love with, he had died.
The SUV door opened, and it was too soon for it to be Adam.
“I’m taking my chances out here,” Gary Laughingdog said. “I got nothing against werewolves, but when they are changing…”
“Just as well,” I told him. “They get pretty grumpy.”
Gary lifted his head and smelled the air. He glanced at me, and I nodded, knowing he was smelling Guayota for the first time. He grimaced. “Just so you know, kid,” he said. “I usually run when the bad things start happening.”
“Me, too,” said Lucia, and Gary and I exchanged quick grins because she was lying.
The sound of the SUV’s door opening had us all turning to look.
Adam was beautiful as man and as wolf. His wolf isn’t huge, not like Samuel’s or Charles’s wolves are, but he is substantial and graceful. He flowed out of the vehicle without making a sound, a blue-gray wolf with black markings. He raised his head and looked at the house.
“Okay,” I said. “We’re going in. Adam will take the lead, then me, Lucia, and Gary will be rear guard.”
“You did hear me the first time, right?” Gary said.
“That’s why you are in the rear,” I told him. “To give us warning when the bad guys eat the rear guard.”
He laughed, then took a good look at the door and stopped. “Someone’s been inside,” he said.
Lucia had locked the door when we left for the restaurant, but that hadn’t stopped the interloper. The door had been forced, breaking the frame. Most of the damage was on the inside—apply enough inward force, and that happens.
Adam shouldered the door open and paused, then he kept going. I followed him, wishing for a gun, but I’d left my Sig Sauer in the safe at work and my .44 S&W at home. I hadn’t wanted to retrieve the Sig with all the police and Cantrip agents running around. Maybe I was going to start leaving a gun in each car, too.
Just inside the door, I understood exactly what had made Adam pause. Something had marked territory in the house. I wrinkled my nose. It wasn’t a dog. Or—and I thought about Zack’s complaint about his hotel room—a human peeing in the corner.
“If that is Guayota, I’m going to completely revise my opinion on the manners of primitive gods,” Gary whispered.
“You have heard some of the stories about Coyote, haven’t you?” I asked. True, I hadn’t heard any about him marking territory, but a lot of Coyote stories sound like something thought up in locker rooms by a bunch of horny teenage boys. I was pretty sure Coyote enjoyed those the most. Maybe they were all true.
Adam glanced back at us, and I caught the reproach. He didn’t chatter when he was scared. Adam was the man in charge. Wolf in charge. So if he wanted quiet, we’d better give it to him.
The blood smell had faded once we were in the house—so nothing had died here. I didn’t think. But the urine made it so rank—Lucia was coughing—that I couldn’t be sure.
Nothing alive in here. Tell her to get her things, and we’ll go back to the kennels. Adam’s voice slid into my head like warm honey.
I’d never told him how much I liked it, because, like telling him how sexy it was when he did sit-ups when I could see his bare stomach, it could never be unsaid. He had enough power over me already. He didn’t need to know how weak I was.
I love it when you talk this way to me, too, Adam told me.
“Adam says that whoever broke in is gone now,” I said, trying not to smile because it would be inappropriate. “We’ll have you pack something, then check on the dogs.” I didn’t tell her what I was afraid we’d find in the kennels. Free to run, they might have stood a chance against what I’d faced in my garage. But they hadn’t been free to run. “Where is your bedroom?”
“Second door on the left,” she said.
The door was closed, and I opened it because it was less likely to take damage if it was me than if it was Adam. Werewolves break things like doorknobs. As soon as I opened it, the smell of urine and musk quadrupled. I glanced inside. It looked as though a giant dog had torn the room to bits, piled everything up in the middle of the bed, and peed all over it. Which might have been exactly what happened.
I shut the door quickly. “Belay that plan,” I said. “We’ll find you some clothes at Honey’s.”
It’s not fun watching someone’s life get ripped to bits. Lucia didn’t ask what I’d seen in the room—her nose, human as it was, could smell it, too. She just raised her chin and turned around.
Gary kept his eyes down, careful not to make eye contact with me or Adam, and led the way back through the house. I wondered what I would have seen in his eyes if he’d let me look. Because he wouldn’t have hidden his eyes just to avoid offending someone; coyotes don’t run that way.
As soon as we were all outside, Adam surged to the front of our little parade. He rounded the end of the house, where the gate to the back had been ripped off and thrown to the side. The rest of the fence was a thick hedge, so it was impossible to see what was in the backyard until we were right on top of it.
Gary made a noise, but Lucia just walked into the middle of the bloody mess in her backyard and knelt beside her big white Amstaff and closed the dead dog’s eyes.
There were ten chain-link kennels in the yard, taking up exactly half the space. Each had a doghouse with an extended roof that gave the dogs outdoor space and still had some protection from the weather. The other half of the yard was lawn, mowed to golf-course neatness.
It must have been neat and tidy, even pretty, before someone had killed all the dogs and left. The gates of eight of the kennels had been ripped off their hinges and thrown willy-nilly. Some of them could have been rehung with new hinges, but some of them were badly damaged. One had been crumpled into a ball.
In front of the kennels, eight dogs lay on their sides, each with a single deep wound that had laid open their necks. I recognized the dog that had put his head on my knee and blinked back tears.
“I hate it when the dog dies at the end,” said Gary, his voice tight. He slapped the chain-link wall of a kennel. “I tore up my copy of Old Yeller and threw it away.”
Lucia didn’t flinch at the noise, just rubbed her dead dog’s uncropped ears.
Adam gave me a sharp look, like there was something I wasn’t seeing. I looked again and drew in a b
reath. The dogs were laid out, staged just like the women Guayota had killed. But this staging wasn’t for us, there was a formality here, each dog in front of its kennel.
Innocent sacrifices.
I called Kyle’s number.
“What?” he asked. The foggy connection told me that he was on his Bluetooth connection and driving. He should have already been at Honey’s.
“Did the Canary Islanders sacrifice dogs to Guayota?” I asked. “And why aren’t you already at Honey’s?” The dead dogs and the state of Lucia’s bedroom made me sharper than I should have been.
“First,” said Kyle grumpily, “we are very nearly at Honey’s. We’d have left sooner if I hadn’t had to figuratively hold the hands of one of my clients whose soon-to-be-ex wife called and said she was sorry for all the times she slept with other people and couldn’t they reconsider their marriage. The answer to that one is no, by the way, because she darn near drove him to suicide once, and he’s a good man and deserves better.”
“Okay,” I said. “What about the dogs?”
“I know they used to sacrifice goats to Achamán,” he said. “One of the guided tours we took mentioned it. I don’t know anything more.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll see you both when we get to Honey’s.”
I looked at the dead dogs again. They still looked like sacrifices to me. Witches drew power from pain and suffering, but also from death. Gary had said that Guayota needed a source of power. There had been dead dogs among the bodies I’d discovered out in Finley, too. But I didn’t think Guayota had made sacrifices to himself.
I wasn’t going to say it in front of Lucia, but I was pretty sure that what had killed the dogs had not been Guayota. Guayota could have killed them, could have twisted the gates off their hinges. But there was a possessive sort of territoriality in the destruction of Lucia and Joel’s bedroom—whatever had done it had been marking his territory. And none of the dogs had put up a fight.
Maybe Guayota could control dogs the way he’d controlled the tibicena in my garage. But if he were going to kill something, I didn’t think he’d use a blade—he’d have used fire.