Wolf on the Road (3 page)

Jake shook his head. For the first time, Mali looked at him more deeply than as a passing curiosity. He had these steely hazel eyes with flecks of light in them. It reminded her of sparks bursting from a struck piece of flint. He had a chin, too, but not a giant Captain America jaw, just a very strong one. He noticed her looking after a couple seconds. “Something wrong?” he asked.

“Er, no, sorry.” She laughed it off, trying to act like she hadn’t just been visually devouring him. “I was just, you know...”

“Thinking?” he asked with a grin that she could’ve slapped off his gorgeous face if she had the wherewithal. And, you know, the desire to hit him. He
did
just save her, after all. Or at least, that’s how things looked.

As she did the thinking she claimed to be doing, something occurred to Mali that wasn’t entirely pleasant. “How do I know you’re not
with
them?” she asked. “How do I know you aren’t another shape shifting biker?”

He furrowed his brow, frowning deeply. “So you’re willing to just go along with the shape shifting business? That’s not entirely what I expected to hear.”

Mali wandered away from the outcropping they stood behind, and shoved her fists into the small of her back. She bent backwards, sighing when her back finally gave a satisfying
pop!
and then relaxed slightly. She looked back at him, popped her back again, and then squatted down. After thinking for a moment, she stood back up and began to pace back to where Jake was standing, but changed her mind and crouched again.

“This is like watching someone come unglued,” he complained, loudly enough she could hear, which seemed to be the point.

“You got some damn nerve,” she said. “Like, really, you have some incredible nerve. Or maybe I should say gall. Or gumption, though I don’t know if I’ve ever actually learned the definition for gumption. Whatever it is, you’ve got it though.”

“What are you talking about?” Jake finally did walk closer to where Mali was standing, but she matched every step of his forward with one back. “Those guys were gonna kill you! Suddenly, I understand all my little brother’s bitching about humans. I always took him for a baby, but you people are infuriating!”

There was a moment of silence, that both of them needed to catch their breath a little and let the tension run down a few notches. When Jake next opened his mouth, Mali did at the exact same time, and they both got out a half-syllable before shutting up.

“You first,” they said in unison.

“No you!” they did it again. That time, Mali’s scowl cracked slightly.

“I’m not talking until you do,” she said.

“You talk first because I’m not saying shit,” Jake offered, at the exact same time Mali was insisting he talk first.

The two of them sighed, Jake smiled and Mali cracked a single boom of laughter. “Okay, okay,” she finally said as she raised her hands to ward off him talking. “Let’s get something straight. I don’t believe a word you said, and I’m never going anywhere with you as soon as we go back and get my bike. I’m out of here. Shit, I probably need to get back to town and start begging for my job. My boss isn’t exactly the caring sort.”

Jake studied her face like a predator trying to find a weakness in a flock of deer. His eyes were so narrowed that the dark irises almost seemed black. He wasn’t frowning, but the lines in the corners of his mouth made him vaguely resemble a steely-eyed Clint Eastwood staring down the sights of a pistol, about to blast some poor outlaw to hell.

“You’re cute when you’re mad,” he said after a long while.

In a move that Jake did not in any way expect, although he probably should’ve, Mali shot him a nasty look. “Really? You just said that? You for some reason felt like it was appropriate to comment on the way I look while I’m worried about my job? And about, you know, what the hell is going on in my entire life right now? And you thought ‘hey, I know what I’ll do. I’m gonna call her pretty, that’ll solve everything.’ You really did that?”

Jake looked immediately disarmed. “Well, I mean, I just thought it so I said it.”

“I imagine you do a lot of that, don’t you?”

“No, just when what I’m saying is true.”

She put her hands on her hips after hiking up her jeans. “No, jackass, I mean that you think without talking. You big, obnoxious hero types always seem to think that your swagger is good enough, so you don’t need a filter on your mouth. Do I have it about right?”

Jake stared back, not quite sure what to make of this transformation. “I didn’t mean—”

“No, of course you didn’t. Your type never does. You never mean things when you get called on your bullshit. It was just a joke, you’d say, or that you meant something a different way. Well god damn it, hey! Listen to me!”

Jake had started examining something he found stuck in the toe of his boot. At first it looked like a thumbtack or maybe a goathead burr, but when he looked closer, he saw that it was crystalline and sharp. Not only was it something he’d never noticed before, examining this tiny shard was also a good way to pretend he wasn’t listening to Mali’s verbal assault. If nothing else, he’d learned that when someone really gets going, it might be best to just let them go until they run out of gas.

“You’re not running out of gas anytime soon, are you?” he asked out loud and immediately sighed in disappointment at himself. “My damn mouth. I guess you’re right about that whole filter thing.”

When he finally got the courage up to look back toward Mali, she still had her hands on her hips, but she’d joined that universal symbol of being put-out with pursed lips and a narrow-eyed scowl.

“I’m sorry!” he finally said, standing up and starting to get excited. “I say things I don’t mean because usually, you know, alpha wolves don’t have to watch their damn mouths. I can tell you’re different though. I’m guessing you’re not one for putting up with shit?”

“Did you just say ‘alpha wolf’?” Mali asked, curling her lip into a sneer. “You got a bunch of tee shirts with howling wolves to go with your attitude? How about a fedora or two? Are you the sort that stares at girls when they’re at the gym and doesn’t even bother trying to hide it when you take photos of them mid-squat?”

Jake didn’t respond. He was still staring at the shard he pulled from his boot, and turning over in his fingers. “Shit,” he said casually. “You know what this is?”

Mali immediately forgot her harangue and squatted down. If anything could get her away from being irritated, it was a mystery. “Looks like a tooth,” she said. “Where’d you get a metal tooth?”

Jake shook his head and not for the first time, Mali noticed that his hair moved in a certain way that reminded her of a movie star. He’d obviously not spent much time styling it, and the wind had done a good job of removing anything he’d done, but it still fell into place just so. “Staring at me again?” he asked. He curled the left corner of his mouth in a smile, but didn’t look away from what was, in fact, a metal tooth.

“No,” Mali said quickly. “Also, shut up.”

He rotated the tooth again, staring at the way sunlight caught it and glinted off in little flashes. “We need to get this to my brother,” he said. “Something about it just isn’t right. First of all, like where the hell I got a tooth stuck in my boot, and second of all, why there’s a tooth in my boot. I don’t know, but I get the feeling it has something to do with those bikers.”

“The shape shifting ones? What kind of shapes? Triangles?” Mali asked, standing up and sighing. “I need to get home.”

Instead of responding, Jake just grabbed her hand and dragged her after him. “Hey!” she cried out. “What the hell are you doing?”

He spun on his heel, grabbing her other wrist at the exact same time. “I’m not going to let anything hurt you,” he said. “You can call me whatever you want—I’m no hero—but you’re in trouble and we need to find out why.”

She stared at him for a brief moment. Then, Mali swallowed hard. “You seem serious,” she said.

As the two of them sat there watching each other’s eyes, she started to remember. “They swarmed me,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I was dead. And then I woke up with this bite thing on my neck and...”

Jake grunted. “I had to do it. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Why would I mind being saved? But what are you talking abou—”

“Not being saved,” he said flatly. “About now being a werewolf.”

For the first time in her entire life, Mali fell flat on her face. Jake collected her, and gave the rock they’d been standing in front of a shove. It creaked out of the way, revealing a shockingly large motorcycle. “Glad that actually worked,” he said under his breath as he heaved Mali’s limp body into place. After a few moments, he’d satisfied himself with the bungie cord tie-job he’d done on her, and then secured her wrists around him. “She ain’t gonna be happy when she wakes up, but...at least she’ll wake up alive.”

––––––––

“I
’ll show those sons of bitches!” A pair of ill-fitting metal dentures clashed together, and the words Petunia Lewis, the world’s only carnivorous rabbit shifter, heavily lisped every S into slobbery TH sounds. As if remembering she’d put her teeth in, she shook her head and pulled them out, plopping them wetly into a cup.

The dentures were a marvel, really. They fit around her other teeth, sort of like a hockey player’s bridge work. But, they were sharpened so that she could eat the only thing she loved—lots and lots of meat. Carrots put Petunia to such anger she couldn’t control her rage. In fact, she’d gotten so pissed off a while back at root vegetables that she ended up half-dead, floating down the Greater James River.

Then, she ended up in the Jamesburg Jail doing a two-to-five for aggravated mischief. She vandalized a peaceful bear’s garden and then threatened a whole pre-school full of shifter cubs. That was dumb enough. After that, though, she had tried to hatch a plan to flood the entire town which, of course, didn’t work out too well.

She’d gotten two-to-five because no one could figure out quite how to classify her hare-brained plot, no pun intended... or maybe pun very much intended, but it hadn’t actually ended in any kind of damage. And aside from that, she was a model prisoner. Aside from sexually harassing the guards at the Jamesburg Jail, she never acted out, never did anything wrong. She took her medication, which was the main part of her recovery, and promised never again to don her silver dentures and go on another rampage.

But people don’t really change. Not really.

And, she hadn’t forgotten that, and she sure as shit wasn’t going to forgive it. She was tired of playing that she was sorry, she was tired of pretending like she wasn’t who she was. So, when they let her out of the lockup and had her on a once-per-month reporting schedule to the Jamesburg Probation Office, she hid.

One thing about Petunia: no matter how bizarre she might be, she’s damn good at hiding. After all, she did it for three years, six months, and a day and a half, just long enough to convince Erik Danniken, the Jamesburg alpha and more or less the judge, jury and executioner of the town, to let her out.

Well, that and the fact that she was one of three people imprisoned at the time in the Jamesburg Jail, and the other two were about as harmless as blind ferrets. That might’ve been because they
were
blind ferrets.

Petunia left her little cottage behind when she went underground, and although she loathed the diet eaten by every other bunny shifter on earth, she found that she quite enjoyed living in a warren. Admittedly, hers was better anointed than most: she’d had it wired for high speed internet, and managed to get a sixty-inch plasma screen down the inconspicuous staircase leading down to her abode.

“Ma’am?” a shaky, unsure, and frightened voice came.

And then there were the bikers.

Petunia grunted as she hauled herself up out of her chair and hopped onto the table top and stared straight into the shaggy wolf’s face. “What?” she asked with more courtesy than she meant to have. “I mean, what do you
want
?” she corrected herself with a more villainous tone. “I’m busy!”

“Yes ma’am,” he said with a slight stutter. “It’s just that, uh... well, something’s happened and I think you ought to know. And—”

“There’s
more
?” Petunia hissed. Her nastiness was starting to come back. The near death experience mellowed her edge for a few months, but the more time passed, the more she remembered who she really was and how to be a bad ass bunny.

“Well I was just going to say that I know you don’t pay me to think. It’s... it’s the joke you say a lot.”

“It isn’t a joke,” she said, as she sat back down and then hopped right back up again. “Talk!” she demanded. She prodded the wolf in the chest with one of her stubby fingers. To manage that, she had to take a pair of steps closer to him, so that her toes were dangling off the edge of the table. She clenched her feet into tiny toe-fists and gritted her teeth.

“Yes ma’am,” he said again. “We just... we found Danniken.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” she asked. “That’s the only job you had, so now you’re done and I don’t have to put up with you foul mouthed, smelly shits?”

“Well it ain’t... it isn’t, sorry, it isn’t quite that simple.”

For all her other traits, Petunia was an absolute stickler for correct grammar. Also, she just really hated it when people used the word ‘ain’t’. She’d hired the bikers after a run-in with a few people in town who recognized her, and tried to get the cops to storm her warren. Jamesburg’s police force—made up mostly of hyenas known for their tenacity, though there were a pair of bears in the department these days—was small, but fierce. She’d lost them, but not without a couple of
real
close calls.

Petunia knew it wouldn’t be all that long until someone happened upon the public storm shelter that, if you knew were to poke at the bottom, led right to Petunia’s warren. She figured she had until Fall, which is when the big storms usually hit Jamesburg. All she had to do was exact her revenge, whatever that was, and then she could disappear. She could move somewhere else and change her name. She could get a night job at Walgreens and forget all about her villainous past. The possibilities, Petunia thought, were infinite.