Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(19)

Adam huffed a reluctant agreement. We didn’t like using Aiden as a weapon. He was under our protection, not the other way around.

But he was right—he knew things we didn’t.

“Okay,” I said. “But if I say run, you run.”

He gave me a look. It was probably not a look of agreement. Who was it that said leadership is a matter of never giving orders that you know will not be obeyed? I figured that his silence was the best I was going to do.

I stepped into Adam’s office to change. Modesty was a thing that I’d left behind a long time ago, but Aiden looked like a kid. Unless there were dying people involved, I would strip naked out of his sight.

Once I was changed into my coyote self, Aiden let Adam and me out of the kitchen and closed the door behind us. They followed me through the backyard. Night had fallen and the stone fence looked strange in the light of the waxing moon, out of place and mysterious. We all climbed through the old barbed-wire fence instead of climbing over the stone.



* * *



? ? ?

I had thought that I remembered exactly where the jackrabbit had been. But though I could smell a mouse somewhere nearby—and Adam scared up a pair of rabbits of the regular variety following the only rabbit trail we could find—there were no jackrabbits.

We went to the Cathers’ house and sniffed around the garden. I found a rabbit trail, but it was crossed and recrossed by a dozen people walking over it. I finally found a bit of it that led off the property, and the three of us set off through fields and backyards to find out if it was a jackrabbit.

Rabbits of all kinds smelled like rabbits. I could tell one individual rabbit from another—but to my nose there was no difference between a Flemish giant and a cottontail.

As soon as the trail took us through private property belonging to other people, Adam called pack magic to make us harder to notice. I didn’t argue; people shoot at coyotes and I had the buckshot scars on my backside to prove it. The danger was reduced because it was night—but there were three of us, and a 250-pound werewolf and a boy weren’t as good at stealth as a coyote was.

Rabbits don’t travel in straight lines, and this one had rambled all over. Our bit of hometown was a patchwork quilt of large fields and once-large fields broken up into odd-shaped properties with homes ranging from 1960s trailers to modern mansions and everything in between, as well as a few industrial plants on the river.

We passed by or through hayfields, marijuana farms, organic farms, berry farms, and a few small vineyards, though the best vineyard country is on the other side of the TriCities, and we ran through a lot of backyards, too. There were horses, cows, goats, chickens—all of whom ignored us, wrapped as we were in pack magic. The cats saw through the magic, as did the foxes. But they only watched our passing without sounding any alerts.

At one point we jumped into a backyard that was full of old cars. Most of them were rotted husks, with kochia, tackweed, and Virginia creeper growing up through the old floorboards—but there was a row of cars next to the house that were covered in tarps, and one of them . . .

I ducked my head low and tried to see under the tarp without being too obvious about it. Adam nipped me lightly on the hip and Aiden laughed. A light went on in the house and we all scrambled to get out of the yard before the back porch light turned on.

Fortunately, there was a break in the fence big enough for Aiden to get through, and even more fortunately, that was the hole the rabbit had used to get out, too.

Trailing prey by scent for long takes a lot of concentration, even when there aren’t mysterious tarps hiding what I was pretty sure was an old Karmann Ghia. Adam and I started trading off who was following the trail every ten minutes or so.

Rabbits are usually more territorial than this one was. I’d trailed rabbits in circles before, but never such a long trail over new territory. We didn’t run into any old trails where the rabbit crossed its own path, as it would if this were its usual haunts. It made me think we might be on the right track.

The trail eventually took us across a road and into Two Rivers Park, a swath of green space along the river where the Snake joined the Columbia. Two Rivers wasn’t all that far from our home, but we hadn’t taken anything like a direct route here. Some of the park is groomed for picnics and recreation, but a fair bit is left wild with trails shared by equestrians and hikers. That was the part that the rabbit led us to.

Aidan stopped by a big sagebrush. “Hey. Over here,” he said. “I think I’ve found your rabbit. Parts of him, anyway.”

We trotted over to him but we didn’t get quite there before we discovered something else. I froze, but Adam growled, the silvery ruff around his neck rising up, as did the hair along his spine.

I changed into human. I was taking a chance because we weren’t out of sight of the road, but it was dark. Humans would need more light than that to see that I was naked. Nonhumans probably wouldn’t care.

Aiden could see just fine in the dark. But we needed to communicate and it was a lot faster for me to change than for Adam to do it. He could, if the occasion warranted, pull on the pack for power to make the change more quickly, but then he’d be stuck walking home naked. A lovely sight, sure, but also illegal.

“Werewolves,” I told Aiden. “Strangers.” I glanced at Adam when I said this. I didn’t know the three wolves I’d scented, but he was older than I and had traveled more among the werewolves. He knew a lot more of them than I did.