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Where was she going, she wondered—
The animal ran out in front of the car so fast that she couldn’t swerve to avoid it, and the thing was so big that when she hit the poor thing, the whole car bucked and got thrown to one side.
“Dammit!” She punched the brakes and squeezed the steering wheel hard.
Shoving the gearshift into park, she opened the door and leaned out, but she couldn’t see anything. With a shaking hand, she released the seat belt and put one foot on the ground, and as she stood up, she decided that everything that could go wrong was going to—
It was a dog.
A big dog. Maybe a wolf . . . at least going by the size of the rear paw that was extending out from the front wheel.
No growling. No moving. No wheezing.
She’d obviously killed it.
Sagging in her own skin, she wanted to break down. It felt like everything was working against her, and though she knew her own life was in danger, and she’d just lost the man she loved—the idea she’d hurt an innocent animal was utterly unbearable.
And then there was the reality that she had to move it out from under the car if she was going to continue driving.
“You got to do this,” she muttered.
And wasn’t that the theme song of her largely dark and depressing reality at large.
Pulling herself together, she palmed up her gun, and stepped around the door—
Rio froze.
Then she slowly brought her free hand to her mouth and just barely caught the scream from breaking out of her throat.
There was a human foot on the ground in front of the wheel. Not a paw.
So she was either losing her mind . . . or her eyesight.
Stumbling around to the front of the car, she saw something that her eyes simply refused to process. There was . . . some kind of change happening to the dog . . . the wolf . . . it was changing.
The wolf was changing.
Right before her.
Its white-and-gray fur seemed to be retracting back into the skin underneath, and a series of cracking noises, like bones or joints were breaking, sounded out as limbs reshaped and pushed the feet and the hands forward. And then there was the face. The muzzle sucked back to become a chin, mouth and nose, while the head expanded, a rounded skull taking the place of the canine square top.
Rio took a step back. And another.
She knew she should care that she was spotlit in the headlights, but her brain was taken up by—
She hit something solid.
And as she gasped, she smelled that cologne Luke always wore.
Jumping off of him, she wheeled around—and played a horrific game of connect the dots as her eyes fluttered: Blink. She saw the dog that burst through the door into that apartment and attacked the man who was going to kill her. Blink. Luke was there in ill-fitting clothes, freeing her from the stakes in the floor. Blink. She remembered Apex being brought to his knees in the weak sunlight of that hallway. Blink. She was back dragging Luke to the back door’s stairwell, pulling him out of the sunshine as his skin burned. Blink. Nocturnal. Blink. “Mates,” not “married.” Blink. The fuzzy thoughts she’d suddenly had after Luke had stared deeply into her eyes before she’d left the farmhouse. Blink . . .
I only took as much as I absolutely had to.
Rio pointed the gun at Luke, horror and disbelief overcoming her.
“What the hell are you,” she demanded. “What the hell are you!”
One great thing about unmarked cars, particularly the older ones, was that you could kill all the lights. No head- or tail- or running. Nothin’.
In the modern era, where everybody and his uncle was playing nanny to the child you hadn’t been for years, it was nice to have the option to just say, Hey, I don’t need to attract any goddamn attention right now so I’m going dark. Thanks.
As José sat behind the wheel and stared across at the parking lot behind the station house, he was watching Stan’s office up on the third floor. He knew he had the right set of windows because homicide’s lineup was always lit, and the ten glowing glass panes in a row grounded him. Plus, hey, the building wasn’t that big anyway.
Stan was moving around in his digs. And he went into the bathroom—José knew this because the little slot of a window that didn’t match any of the others in the facade went bright.
José glanced across to his passenger seat. The envelope that the nice pregnant neighbor had brought over to Rio’s apartment was sitting on top of Leon Roberts’s wallet and cell phone.
The rest of the case that José was constructing was in his head.
And his broken heart.
“Helluva way to go out,” he muttered—and didn’t know whether he was talking about Stan or himself.
