Cry Baby Hollow (38 page)

Aubrey gave Drake a good, long pet, and walked to the door. He trotted along beside her, not even favoring the leg that had his only real wound.

“I’ll see you soon, boy,” she promised and, grabbing the Mossberg, headed out to Joe’s truck. Rose had to grab Drake’s collar to keep him from following, and Aubrey felt strangely relieved as she started the truck and drove off toward the cabin. Seeing them all standing on the front porch, waving good-bye and calling good luck, it felt as if the hardest part of the night were already over.

As she drove along the rutted, gravel road and dusk began to fall in the hollow, she found herself singing snatches of the song from the Halloween party.

“Together at last at twilight time…”

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Aubrey went into
the cabin, closed and locked the door, and set the Mossberg down on the kitchen counter. She hurried into the bathroom and shucked her dirty jeans and sweater, pulling on a pair of sweat pants and digging through the laundry for a shirt. She found one of Joe’s t-shirts mixed in with her dirty clothes. Feeling foolish but doing it anyway, she held it to her face for a moment and breathed in his scent. On impulse, she pu
lled it over her head and tucked it in. It was huge on her, big enough to be a nightgown, but she found it oddly comforting.

She went back out to the living room, pulled her leather jacket on, and sat at the dining room table to wait. She didn’t bother checking her weapons. She’d checked them both a dozen times already. The trap was set, all that was left to do was sit tight and wait for them to spring it.

Darkness settled in and Aubrey was about to go get herself a glass of water when her cell phone rang. She glanced at the caller ID and saw Vina’s name. Calling her wasn’t part of the plan, and Aubrey felt a tight knot form in the pit of her stomach. She flipped open the phone.

“Get your ass over here,” Vina barked, her voice as close to panic as Aubrey had ever heard it. “They’re in the house! They’re taking him!”

Aubrey heard a shotgun blast both over the phone and echoing across the lake, and then the line went dead. Aubrey didn’t need to hear his name to know who they’d grabbed. A hundred thoughts ricocheted around in her head and suddenly clicked into place. She felt like a complete fool, and knew that her mistake might have just cost Joe his life.

She dropped the phone and grabbed the Mossberg on her way out the door, her plan instantly dissolving.

“They took Joe,” she screamed into the night.

In the middle of the front yard, a wolf was waiting for her.

“Go get Joe,” she told it, ashamed at the note of hysteria in her voice. It sat still, staring at her, its eyes little reflective beacons in the dark. Aubrey heard yipping in the distance and a shotgun blast. The wolf ignored the sounds and Aubrey realized that at some point she was going to have to figure out a way to tell them all apart.

She leveled the shotgun at it and fired, but they had learned that while a single blast might not kill them, Aubrey wasn’t partial to single blasts. It dodged aside and around in a loop, staying ahead of her steady stream of fire.

When she was out of ammo, she continued toward it, reloading as she walked. It lunged forward, but she whipped out the Beretta and peppered its flank. As it shifted to a girl and back to a wolf seamlessly, healing itself, Aubrey kept coming, slamming shells into the Mossberg until it was full. She fired the shotgun again, winging it. This time, when it shifted, Aubrey watched carefully. She recognized the long, slender legs and the perfect breasts and smiled, knowing half the men in the county would recognize the woman too. Katie Carmichael. Aubrey fired as Katie shifted back to wolf form and walked forward, driving her back toward the road and then along it toward Joe’s RV.

As they reached the end of Joe’s driveway Aubrey saw flames dancing among the trees. Joe’s RV was burning. She heard a series of yips from the woods. They must have been a prearranged signal, because ahead of her Katie shifted again, not into a woman, but into the monstrous form of a half. She reared up, huge and terrible. Aubrey fired the Mossberg at her, but she dodged the shot easily. She was stronger and faster, but Aubrey didn’t mind, that was the kind of fight she was used to.

Katie lunged forward, coming at her like a linebacker eager to sack the quarterback, and this time, it was Aubrey’s turn to dodge aside. She let her momentum carry her around and swung the shotgun like a baseball bat, clipping Katie’s leg with it as she passed and hearing a satisfying crack as bone broke.

“I bet you thought this was going to be easy,” Aubrey told her conversationally, bringing the shotgun up and shooting her in the back as she shifted back to wolf. “But the thing is, you’re not very good. I’m betting you’re used to fighting people who just scream and run away.”

Aubrey heard another gunshot and a howl in the distance. A new plan took form in her head. She didn’t need to find and rescue Joe, if she could draw enough of Katie’s friends to her, the others would probably be able to manage it themselves.

Katie dashed into the trees beside the road and Aubrey pursued her, firing again. She realized they were on the trail she had cut so that she could walk in the woods instead of along the road. She remembered thinking she would be safer in there, away from Wayne’s eyes, and laughed at herself. What she wouldn’t give to have only a leering man to deal with now.

She saw Katie ahead of her, in half form again, but still running along the trail, away. Aubrey grinned and followed as fast as she could, firing whenever she got a shot. She might not have much experience with werewolves, but Vina and the others had schooled her well in the limited time they had.

Keep them shifting, they had told her. Don’t let them catch their breath. Shifting is hard and disorienting and it takes a moment to get your bearings. If you can keep them on the run, you can win. Of course, that plan only worked if you only had one to deal with, and Aubrey was aware that the odds of that being the case for much longer lessened with every step she took into the trees.

At Murder Creek, Aubrey lost sight of Katie. She grabbed a handful of shells and shoving them into the Mossberg as quickly as she could.

She felt something slam into her leg, and she fell to her knees. A wolf shot past and she fired, missing by a mile.

Crap, Aubrey thought, struggling to her feet. Was it Katie, or had reinforcements finally arrived? She looked into the blackness around her and, for the first time, she felt a little shiver of fear.

Something lunged out of the darkness to her right, grabbing the Mossberg and ripping it out of her grasp, then dashing away again before she could even draw the Beretta. They were toying with her, Aubrey realized, leading her deeper into the woods and further from any hope of help. Without a fire at the plant to keep all the police busy, they needed her where Larry’s patrols, even if they heard the gunfire, wouldn’t be able to find her.

Aubrey heard a howl, long and low, far off in the distance. She pulled out the Beretta and ran forward, aware that she was playing into their hands, and not caring. When she saw movement on the path ahead she stopped and fired again and again, until the clip was empty and the gun clicked uselessly in her hand. She ejected the empty clip and pulled out another.

“Want this one?” A voice purred from the trees beside the path.

Katie stepped out, naked and smiling. She tossed Aubrey the Mossberg.

“I’m afraid it’s empty now too,” she said, her red hair gleaming and her teeth flashing.

Aubrey caught the shotgun, letting the Beretta and the fresh clip fall to the ground. She knew Katie would be on her before she could reload, but at least the shotgun made a good club.

“You’re an idiot,” Katie purred.

Oh good
, Aubrey thought,
she’s going to be a Bond villain and tell me all about how smart she is.
She smiled, aware that every minute Katie was gloating was another minute she wasn’t eviscerating her.

“You’re right,” Aubrey told her, stalling for time. “I was an idiot. I thought this was about getting revenge on me for what I’d done to
The Bitch
, but you didn’t care about that. If anything, you were grateful. Even though she couldn’t change anymore, she was still the alpha dog and she was still calling all the shots, holding you back, giving you orders. She didn’t understand the kind of threats the modern world was throwing at you. She didn’t understand that it wasn’t just a matter of Joe telling people what you are, he could show them. He could prove it, scientifically.”

“And I know he must have copies of all his information,” Katie continued for her. “But he’ll tell me where now, if not for himself, then to save you. I tried to play nice. All he had to do was get a little cozy and I’d have given him a hell of a sendoff. Now we have to do it the hard way, and that’s so much less fun.”

She took a step forward and Aubrey willed her to come just a little closer so she could knock those perfectly straight, white teeth down her throat.

“Memaw wouldn’t let us touch him, all because of some ancient truce that there was no one left here to enforce. She didn’t understand genetics. She wouldn’t even let us move her to a house with electricity. She said she could hear it buzzing in the walls. She said the vibrations from the refrigerator came up through the floorboards and controlled your thoughts. She was an old superstitious bat, still trapped in the last century. I told her that as soon as Rose was done, any day now, he wouldn’t have any reason not to tell people. I tried to explain that he had to be dealt with, but she idiot. She refused to listen.”

“Maybe she was,” Aubrey agreed. “And maybe I am too, but before you think you’re going to get a shiny gold star from the teacher, you might take a moment to wonder how it is I ran out here after you on my two… Good… Legs…” Aubrey smiled wickedly as Katie’s eyes went wide.

She threw the shotgun at Katie’s head and slid out of her leather jacket, letting the change take her. She tried to stop the change, tried to pull it up before it really began, just like she’d unsuccessfully practiced earlier with the others coaching her along. She felt hot and raw, like her blood had turned to molten lead. Aubrey sighed, aware that she was turning as fast as they did, but feeling time slow down. It was like nothing she’d ever felt before and, yet it was everything she’d ever felt before, boiled down into one timeless moment of clarity, one perfect instant when her body was both in and of the world. She failed to stop at half, but that was alright. Even if all she could do was shift between wolf and human, the ability to heal like they did would even the odds a good bit. She dropping onto all fours and slipping out of her baggy clothes.

Just run, she told herself. Even if you can’t draw any more away, keeping Katie out of the fight will do.

She shot off down the trail, a streak in the darkness. It hadn’t been like that the first time. The first time she’d managed to shift, only moments after John shot her up with what he called his “hormone cocktail” in Vina’s study, she had made it to the wolf form only to take one step and fall flat on her face.

Betty had giggled uncontrollably and confessed that when she’d first tried to run, she’d done the same thing. It was a matter of thinking too much, she told her. You had to think about something other than the fact that you had too many feet. If you thought about that, you tripped over them. Don’t think about where each one goes any more than you do when you run as a woman. Just tell your body to run, and let it work out the details for you.

Count backward from a hundred, Lettie had advised, or make a grocery list in your head.

Aubrey didn’t need to do either. As soon as she realized that her new form obeyed the commands from her brain exactly the same way as her old one had, she had raced around the room like a dervish.

Now she sped away. Her fur, the same glossy black as her hair when she was human, blended into the darkness. She didn’t need to squint to see in the starlight or look back to know that Katie was hot on her heels. She didn’t care. Katie’s skinny little aerobicized ass wasn’t going to catch her unless Aubrey let her. She saw the cutoff to three caves ahead and jinked left, into the trees. She bounded over half-rotten logs, and when she hit Murder Creek, she ran along it, leading Katie in a great wide loop back toward the road.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Ahead of her
, Aubrey saw the path again and knew she was back where she h
ad started. The timing was going to be tricky. She could feel Katie behind her, unable to catch her but still so close. Her paws hit the trail and she shifted, letting the change come again, stopping it, as Vina had coached, even before it had taken hold. Vina had said that some of them never managed to half, and some of them could only do it once in a while, but she also said that it was in Aubrey’s blood. Vina said Aubrey’s grandmother had made it look like a dance, she had shifted so smoothly from form to form. Aubrey felt something inside her catch, like a cog notching into a gear, and knew she had succeeded.

She felt herself grow into something tall and powerful, a thing of nightmares. She understood why it was so hard for some people, why Erma had said it was more an art than a skill. She felt the wolf and the woman in her, both struggling mightily to get out, but she held the form steady and came up off all fours, standing tall. She turned, holding her ground as Katie ran toward her. She brought up her fur covered, clawed hand and slammed the new clip into the Beretta.

And they had thought she was a pain in the ass before.

Katie leapt for her throat and Aubrey fired into her, unable to aim well or even hold the gun properly with her large, awkwardly powerful hands. They fell together and Aubrey grappled with her, feeling Katie changing from wolf to half. She lunged to her feet, dropping the empty gun and grabbing a handful of loose flesh at the nape of the wolf’s neck as its jaws sought her throat and it flowed into its new form. Aubrey lifted it, flinging it with all her might into the nearest tree. She heard a loud crack as Katie collided with the trunk and hoped something had broken.

She stepped forward to finish her off, but heard a low growl and spun around. Another half charged up the path, coming toward her quickly on all fours. Aubrey knew she could never hope to handle two of them, and her heart sank as she saw a wolf coming up behind it. The cavalry had arrived, and Aubrey didn’t like her odds at all. She braced herself, planting her feet wide. Her only consolation was that if she could hold out long enough, the others might have a chance of getting Joe.

Just before the half reached her, a white streak came shooting out of the woods to the left. Drake hit the creature broadside, sending it sprawling. The wolf behind it leapt into the air, landing on its back and sinking its jaws into the things neck. Rose, Aubrey realized. She lunged forward to help her rescuers, but felt her legs go out from under her and a searing pain lance through her side.

Aubrey rolled, feeling her half form slip away as the woman in her won out. She rolled away, naked and fragile, and came up in a crouch. Katie was looming over her, halved again and making a terrible, barking noise. She was laughing, Aubrey realized. Katie was laughing at her. Well hell, Katie might be good at wrestling with drunken hillbillies, but Aubrey had learned to spar against Marines and Seals. She slid into wolf form, not trusting herself to manage half and unwilling to be caught as a woman. She darted between Katie’s legs and latched on to one, sinking her jaws in deep, feeling the tendon snap.

You don’t have to kill her, Aubrey reminded herself, holding tight, just make her change. She gritted her teeth as Katie pummeled her, trying to get her off. She felt claws rake her back and then a sudden, crushing pain as Katie’s hands closed around her neck. Her claws dug into the flesh and the force kept Aubrey from breathing. She bit harder, felt the bone grate against her teeth, and shook her head.