Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(40)

“Yes. We’ve got two ladies who were heading into the bakery to order a wedding cake who saw the whole thing. Truck looked like it was going to go down the tunnel—suddenly swerved to the right—and there was a group of maybe six kids walking across the street. Ladies thought for sure that truck was going to hit them, when it jerked suddenly and impacted the barricade where so many other vehicles have met their doom. They did not see the girlfriend.”

“So do we believe the girlfriend exists?” I asked.

“And did she have a bite mark?” He paused dramatically. “Yes, yes, she did. Our driver, who did not know his own girlfriend’s name on account of him picking her up at a gas station in Finley, said she had a—and I quote—‘weird-ass mark on her arm, man—like she’d been bitten by a vampire’—unquote.”

It fit. Everything except the way the truck had melded with the barricade, anyway. It didn’t seem like the mind-control stuff went together with changing the bottom of a semi tractor into concrete. But my nose didn’t lie—the smoke beast had been here.

“Is the driver still here?” I asked.

“Nope, they took him in for questioning.”

I’d been casually looking around. Funny how easy it was to tell the cops, in uniform and out, from everyone else—and there were a few onlookers now. It was a subtle thing—an in-crowd, out-crowd. Pasco wasn’t that big—all of the police officers knew each other and their body language gave it away.

My eyes caught on one of the onlookers. A dark-complexioned girl wearing shorts and a pink tank top—and her expression was wrong. She was looking at the wrecked vehicle and she didn’t look amazed or worried or excited like everyone else. She looked smug.

“George,” I asked, not taking my eyes off the girl. “Do you have a description for the missing girlfriend?”

She looked up at me at just that moment. There were probably a dozen yards and twenty people between us—and she looked at me as if she had known exactly where I was standing.

She smiled at me and the bite on my neck flared in a bone-shivering spike of pain that made me stagger before it died completely, like something had short-circuited. As it did, her face twisted with pain—and then malevolent anger.

“That’s her,” said George, coming to alert as he saw who I was looking at. “Hispanic female, pink top.”

He didn’t speak loudly, but I think, from her change of expression, she heard him, so her hearing was at least as good as ours. As we started toward her, she looked around at all the police surrounding her. Briefly she looked frustrated—and then she looked at us again. Her shoulders relaxed and she smiled—right before she ran.

George bolted after her—and I bolted after him.

“George,” I called out, because—wouldn’t you know it—George was one of the very few werewolves who were faster than I was. “Let her go—if she bites you, you belong to her! Then you die! George, wait!”

I couldn’t tell if he was paying attention or not. The call of a hunt is pretty strong, and I wasn’t Adam.

The woman fled down a side street that was edged with automotive boneyards, warehouses, and empty lots. She reeked of that distinctive magic and she was moving as fast as a werewolf. I was pretty sure we’d found our jackrabbit. George was hot on her heels, gaining a few inches with every stride.

I was twenty or thirty feet behind them and losing ground rapidly. Neither of them seemed to be having trouble with the rough and uneven sidewalk, but it tripped me up once and I almost tumbled head over heels. I kept my feet but it slowed me down.

The woman dropped out of sight down a narrow dirt track between a pair of industrial-looking buildings that wore an air of abandonment. When George disappeared around the corner, too, I found an extra burst of speed from somewhere.

At the same time, I ripped at the closed bond between Adam and me. It gave in to my frantic attempt, but I’d done something to our bond . . . it felt wounded somehow, bleeding. But I would worry about that later. I needed to keep George safe.

I turned the corner and saw George closing in on the woman quickly—I was pretty sure she had deliberately slowed her pace. There was a woman curled up against the building in a fetal position, her face pressed against the wall as if she were trying to hide. But she wasn’t moving and my instincts told me she wasn’t a threat, so I ran past her.

“George, stop!” The command rang with the power of an Alpha werewolf because I had stolen it from Adam.

George stopped in his tracks, and so did the woman—who was the smoke beast. They had run past the building and stood in what might have been, in better days, a small parking lot. I stopped, too.

“Get back here,” I told George. In my back pocket, my cell phone started to ring. Probably Adam wondering why I’d torn at our bond. But I was busy. I told George again, “If it bites you, it will steal your will. Aiden says that once it takes you over, it will kill you.” Or he would die. Aiden hadn’t been clear on that point, so I wasn’t, either.

When it hadn’t been able to steal my will, it had tried to kill me, though, so I thought what I’d said was a good bet. The running water had severed the connection between it and the bite—but I thought of the smoke I had swallowed. Maybe there had been enough left in me for it to try again today. It hadn’t worked.