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“… fuck,” Gus finished.
“She’s here to protect us.” Daniel looked up from the animal. “She’s our best line of defense. With her nose and her ears, we have nothing to fear out here.”
At which point, the wolf angled “her” head toward Gus. With that tongue lolling out of those fangs, it was hard to reconcile the I’ma-eat-you with the lapdog routine—but you couldn’t argue with the fact that the animal had had more than ample opportunity to chew Daniel’s face off. And his arm.
Maybe one or both of his legs—
The wolf refocused on Daniel and took his sleeve gently between her front teeth. Then she sank down onto her haunches and started tugging.
“What are we doing?” Daniel asked as he stood up.
The wolf released and went to the place in the clearing she’d come out of. Then she pawed at the ground.
“Okay, we’re coming,” the guy said.
“We are?” Gus muttered.
As Daniel walked off, Gus looked around—and considered his options. He had two choices: Stay out here, alone, in the woods—where there were either more wolves that weren’t friendly or the guy with the fucking sodium thiopental back to finish the job—or follow along after a man with a gun who knew how to use it and that carnivore who had a politician’s way with people.
“How the fuck do you know she’s not leading us to a buffet table—where we’re the entree,” he groused as he started to follow.
The rhetorical was answered as Daniel’s handrested on the back of the wolf while the pair went along, winding their way around trees and shrubs, a rock or two, a deer stand. They were in such sync, you’d have sworn they were ballet partners, but fortunately for Gus, they didn’t put on the speed. The going was measured, like the wolf knew she was in charge of two people who weren’t so great on the balance side of things—or endurance, either. And when she finally stopped, Gus was relieved to lean against the trunk of a tree and just breathe.
As the animal fixated on something on the ground, Gus rubbed his face—or tried to. As he bumped into his swollen eye, he winced and dropped his arm. The good news was that the cold air was wonderful in his lungs and on his cheeks, and he could feel that he was getting stronger physically, seemingly by the minute.
He was going to need it when he went back to his condo… and waited for that fucker to come for him again.
Please come finish your job, he thought as he stared up at the gray sky. Because surely his captor would check for his body and find it gone?
Provided Daniel taught him a few things, first.
Refocusing on the wolf and the man, he said, “Whattya got?”
“A set of footprints.” Daniel pointed to what looked like any other square inch of the forest. “Side by side.”
The wolf was shaking her head. Looking around. Shaking her head.
As Daniel’s eyes also did a roundabout, the guy nodded. “And no tracks. They start here, like whoever it was had been dropped from above. And there’s something in the tread of the boots.”
Gus wandered over and glanced down. “Serial numbers?”
“No, like fresh… sawdust—”
“What?” Dropping into a crouch, Gus narrowed his eyes. “Oh, my God. That was the smell.”
“What smell?”
“When I was being… whatever’d… ah—” Sweat broke out across his forehead and down his chest, but he did his best to kick off the reactive anxiety. “There was this smell in the air, I couldn’t place it at the time. But it reminded me of my grandma’s—Pine-Sol.”
Sure enough, inside the tread pattern, there were lemon-yellow flakes… of fresh shavings.
“Except that is the real thing, isn’t it,” Gus murmured.
Daniel glanced up. “You know you can’t go home now, right.” The guy pointed to the prints. “That’s going to be waiting for you.”
“Which is the idea.”
Daniel blinked like he was sorting through various responses and weeding out the ones that didn’t completely emasculate the other half of theconversation he was having. “No, you’re too valuable to waste on a vigilante mission you’re ultimately going to fail at—”
