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“I’m not bleeding.”
“You were. And there is a rip in your hoodie where he got your shoulder.”
He looked at her.
“Was I not supposed to mention it?” She put her hand to her chest. “So sorry, Sir Wolf.”
“In a few hours I’ll heal. You wouldn’t. If you got cut up by a cat’s claws, you would bleed unless we treated the wound. It would make you weak. Hours later you could reopen your wound if you turned the wrong way. Cats are filthy animals, and they carry all sorts of shit on their claws. You could die from an infection.”
They made a right onto Birch Road. To the left the ruin of the mall spread out. During the mall’s life, a narrow strip of lawn had ringed it, dotted by ornamental trees. Now the trees had grown, and thorny bushes sprouted between the trunks, forming nature’s answer to a barbed wire fence and offering only glimpses of the mall beyond. Most of its buildings had long since crumbled into dust. The rains had washed it away, and an occasional sign was all that remained of the shopping center. He read the names—Burlington Coat Factory, PayLess Shoe Store, Ross . . . They meant nothing to him.
“Did you share this cat view with Curran?” Julie asked. “Or are werelions slightly less filthy than other cats?”
He refused to take the bait. “A wound that’s a minor inconvenience to me could be a death sentence for you.”
Julie sighed. “Do you really think that if a wereleopard attacks me, jeans would stop him? Clothes don’t have magic powers, Derek. They don’t mystically protect you from three-inch claws, rapists, or murderers. If someone decides to hurt you, they will do so whether or not you have a thin layer of denim over your skin. Lighten up.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
She narrowed her eyes, looking sly. He braced himself.
“I saw a picture of Hugh when he was your age,” she said.
“Mhm.”
“Hugh was a hottie.”
His reaction must’ve shown on his face, because she threw her head back and laughed.
THE ROAD CURVED GENTLY. They kept going around the bend, to the mouth of Orion Drive. Here no trees hid the mall, and the view was wide open. He stopped. Next to him Julie jumped off her horse, tied Peanut to a tree, and took a cloth backpack from among the saddlebags, hanging it over her left shoulder.
The parking lot unrolled before them, about fifteen hundred feet wide and probably two thousand feet long. Irregular holes pockmarked the asphalt, each filled with mud-colored opaque water. No way to tell how deep they were. A thin fog hung above the water, and in its translucent depths tiny green lights floated, their weak light witchy and eerie. In the center of it all, a spire of dark grey rock jutted out at a forty-degree angle, like a needle that had been carelessly thrust into the fabric of the parking lot. Rough and dark, twenty feet wide at the base and tapering to a narrow end, it rose about thirty feet above the parking lot. Pillar Rock. They would have to clear the parking lot to get to it. The three idiot shapeshifters had been told to meet their contact there.
Derek inhaled. He’d smelled swamp before; it smelled musky and green, of algae and fish and vegetation, like a heap of grass clippings that had been allowed to turn into compost, so new plants could grow from it. It smelled of life. This place smelled of mud and water, but no life. Instead a faint fetid smell of something foul, something rotting and repulsive, slithered its way to him.
Julie tensed, her hand on her tomahawk.
“What do you see?”
“Blue,” she said.
Blue stood for human.
“Ugly, bleached-out blue, almost grey. This is a bad place.”
He took a few steps back and sat on the curb. She moved into the scrub behind him. He heard the tomahawk bite wood. Leaves rustled, and she handed him a six-foot-long dry sapling. A walking stick. He took it and nodded. Good idea. She disappeared again, came back with a walking stick of her own, and sat next to him.
They waited quietly, watching, listening. Minutes dripped by. Mist curled above the dark water and shimmered in the moonlight. Julie didn’t move.
A few years ago, when he was only eighteen, Jim, then Security Chief of the Pack, had put him in charge of a small group of twelve- and fifteen-year-olds who showed potential for covert work. Of all the things Derek tried to teach them, he found patience was the hardest. By now all of them would’ve scratched, or sighed, or made some noise. Julie simply waited. It was so easy with her.
They saw it at the same time: a brief flash of something pale as it moved within the deep blue shadow of the Spire. The hair on the back of his neck rose. Someone stared at them from those shadows. He couldn’t see it clearly, but he felt the weight of its gaze, saturated with malice. It stabbed at him from the gloom. He pretended not to notice. Sooner or later it would get impatient.
The mist began to wane, thinning as if boiling off. It was luring them in.
“It will get foggy once we enter,” he said quietly.
“Yes,” Julie agreed.
