How to Run with a Naked Werewolf (6 page)

While his tone was friendly, his posture was tense. He frowned down at me. “Just wanted to see what was taking so long. You OK?”

“I think this is a mistake,” I said, my fingers frantically searching through my bag for the slapjack. I stepped away from him, putting the open truck door
between us. His brow furrowed, and he took a step toward me. I stepped farther away, onto the sidewalk.

“What’s a mistake?” he asked.

“This whole ‘riding together’ idea. I’ll be fine on my own, really. Thanks for getting me this far, though.” I turned, taking brisk, long steps up the sidewalk. He stood, staring at me, perplexed. “Good luck . . . with your whole Ted Bundy thing,” I muttered softly as I rushed away.

In a blink, Caleb was in front of me, holding my arms against my sides. “What did you mean by that?”

Great, I forgot that my new best friend had an advanced serial-killer kit
and
superhuman hearing. Oh, and healing powers. I was one lucky girl.

“What did you mean?” he demanded. His eyes followed mine back to the open truck door and the cuffs and zip ties lying out on his floorboards.

“What normal person rolls with this sort of thing in his backseat, Caleb?”

“There’s a good explanation for this.”

“I’m sure there is. I just don’t care,” I retorted.

“Look, come inside, have some breakfast with me, and I’ll explain. If you still think I’m a serial killer afterward, I’ll pay the check, and you can stay here at the motel until you figure out what you want to do.”

I shrugged. “OK.”

“Great, let’s go inside,” he said.

“I wasn’t serious!” I exclaimed. “How stupid do you think I am?”

“Look, what’s the harm in having breakfast?” he chided. And he added, “With plenty of witnesses.”

I might have objected that I was fine, not hungry in the slightest. But then my traitorous empty stomach growled, as if on cue.

He smirked at me. “I bet this place has great pancakes.”

I growled in frustration, my shoulders sagged, and I let him nudge me through the front door of the diner. There was a chubby middle-aged man cooking in the kitchen and a bored-looking teenage girl taking orders. Two burly men in plaid flannel sat at the counter, quietly eating steak and eggs. No one, including the teenager, bothered to look up when we walked in.

I might have been embarrassed by my nervous habit of cataloguing each new room’s occupants, but Caleb was equally funny about the seating arrangements. He insisted on a booth by the front window, but he seemed uncomfortable sitting with his back to the door. His safety concerns didn’t exactly increase my trust in him. And despite the fact that I needed the restroom with increasing urgency, I didn’t want to leave him unattended around my food or drink. He was paying for my French toast, but that didn’t entitle him to mickey my OJ.

The food arrived without fanfare from the apathetic teen queen. Caleb’s breakfast consisted of six strips of bacon, sausage, a bloody steak, scrambled eggs, and three pancakes, which I watched him devour with a fascination I used to reserve for
Shark Week.

“OK, we’re eating, you’re paying, now spill,” I said around a mouthful of maple-soaked fried bread. “What’s with the hardware?”

He looked a bit sheepish, chewing his pancake thoughtfully while he chose his words. “I’m a sort of bounty hunter,” he said. “I track people down, people who don’t want to be found. I take them in, collect the reward. Generally, they kick and spit and scream on the long drive home, so I have to restrain them. That’s why I have the handcuffs and the bungee cords.”

My fork practically clattered to the table as a cold weight settled into my belly. Well, that certainly explained why I hadn’t seen him around the valley. He was out wandering the roads, ruining the lives of perfectly nice fugitives. A ripple of alarm skittered up my spine. I clutched the table’s edge with my right hand to calm the slight tremor there. I swallowed carefully and wished I could reach for the juice without bobbling the glass. “Show me your ID.”

His eyebrows rose. “What?”

“Bail bondsmen are required to carry ID with them when they make ‘citizen’s arrests.’ Show it to me.”

He cleared his throat and washed down half a pancake with some coffee. “Well, some of my collars are not quite . . .”

“Legal?” I suggested.

“Yeah,” he said, looking embarrassed for a millisecond.

“Do you carry a gun?”

“No, I don’t get shot at very often.”

“And if that’s not an endorsement for a profession, I don’t know what is,” I said, slowly and deliberately reaching for my juice glass. It was a miracle of concentration that held my hand steady as I sipped. Over
the rim of the glass, I kept my eyes trained on his face, as if I didn’t have a care in the world. Nothing to fear. Nothing to send me running for the nearest exit.

“Normally, people don’t get the drop on me,” he said defensively. “I have a certain set of . . . skills, and they help me when I’m tracking a person. The people in my family have always been hunters. I just apply it in a different way.”

I snorted. He wasn’t kidding. Werewolves had supersensitive noses and ears, not to mention their intuitive ability to track whatever creature was unlucky enough to be targeted by an animal built for hunting.

But again, I was supposed to be playing dumb. Because if I blurted out,
Yeah, I know about the whole werewolf thing that is supposed to be forbidden knowledge for a human such as myself
, there would be a lot of awkward questions. More awkward than the ones currently being bandied across the table, anyway.

“I make a lot of money at something I’m good at. No questions asked, as long as someone is willing to pay me my fee. And sometimes all I have to do is get a little information and pass it along. I like those jobs. Easy money and less time spent rooting around in parking lots.”

His conversation with the guy who shot him made so much more sense now. This Marty guy had been afraid that Caleb was taking him in on money he owed, so he freaked out and started shooting. I did not need this. I did not need to hitch myself to any form of law enforcement, no matter how slipshod. Glenn had contacts in more places than I’d ever imagined—old college
buddies, online gaming clubbers, and sketchy cousins I hadn’t been allowed to speak to at the wedding reception. And all it would take was a couple of opportune Google searches for Caleb to find the online message boards where Glenn had put out feelers for me.

I didn’t think Caleb would have any qualms about handing me over to my ex, “no questions asked.” Even the way he phrased it gave me chills. He sounded so cold, so calculated, so like—

Never mind! Get out!
My brain screamed at me.
Get away!
The ladies’ room was to the immediate left of the door, offset by a small hallway. So feigning a bladder issue and sneaking out the front wouldn’t work. There was probably another exit in the back, through the kitchen, and a fire exit, but both were in Caleb’s line of sight. I willed my face to relax, first my jaw and then my cheeks, so I could speak without looking tense. I took a casual bite of my bacon.

“How do you get your assignments? How do people know how to get ahold of you?” I asked. I leaned forward, resting my chin on my hand as if he had my rapt attention. I glanced behind him. Maybe there was another way out off of the restroom area. These places always had fire exits, but I couldn’t risk setting off some alarm.

“A buddy of mine owns a bar about an hour outside Fairbanks. If people want to get ahold of me, they know to call me there. And I have contacts of my own in Anchorage, Portland, Seattle. Mostly PIs who don’t want to make the trip up here. They get a finder’s fee for hiring me,” he said.

“And you just bounce around on the road?” I asked, swiping the last bite of French toast through the golden puddle of syrup on my plate. I savored the crisp edges of the fried bread, unsure when I’d be able to get another nice, hot meal.

“Sometimes I head home to see my family. But I haven’t been there in a while. They live in the Crescent Valley near Grundy, very tight-knit.”

That explained why I’d never met him. He hadn’t been to the valley for years. I’d heard stories about a Caleb from Maggie, strange “stupid criminal” tales from her cousin the bounty hunter, who hadn’t come back home since his dad, Artie, had died of stroke complications shortly before I was hired on. The funeral service had been held just after I’d arrived, while I was off restocking the clinic’s medications and supplies. I was still so pale and shaky and skittish that Eli, the former pack leader, insisted on sending one of the distant pack cousins with me on the supply run. I only realized later that it was because he was afraid I would take off and not come back. I remembered now that Artie’s son left town before I returned two days later, and that had upset some of the older aunties.

Still, I wondered how Caleb managed to stay away from the valley for so long. Maggie’s brother, Cooper, had exiled himself for a while after a particularly violent interpack confrontation, and the separation nearly drove him insane. How could Caleb stand it?

Not that I could afford to care about that sort of thing, since I was contemplating escaping from this booth and bursting through the front window of the
diner like something out of a
Die Hard
movie. While his being a part of Maggie’s pack was a pleasant surprise, that didn’t necessarily make Caleb a good person. As evidenced by Eli, the interim alpha who hired me just before going on a hiker-killing spree and framing Maggie’s brother, Cooper, for the maulings. Werewolves hit a lot of different points on the spectrum between “awesome guy who is occasionally an apex predator” and “furry Lord Voldemort.”

“So how about you?” he asked, forking up another massive bite of steak. “What’s a nice girl like you doing bouncing around the Great North?”

I gave him a bland smile. “I wanted to see more of the country.”

His being part of Maggie’s pack didn’t make me trust Caleb any more than I had before. I’d made a clean break with them and couldn’t let on that I knew his family. They couldn’t know where I was or where I was heading. It was safer for them and for me. Also, I was pretty sure Maggie would kick my ass for leaving the way I did. She was a stickler about policy and procedure.

“And why are you traveling south?” he asked. “Getting too cold for you?”

“I’m meeting up with a friend,” I lied smoothly.

Caleb tensed. “What sort of friend?”

“An old roommate, Cindy,” I said.

The tension drained out of Caleb’s frame, and he scooped up another bite. “Well, that’s nice. But you never know what could happen.”

I arched an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“Well, plans change sometimes,” he said vaguely.

What did he mean by that? Was he going to change my plans for me? Under the table, my hand instinctively wrapped around my shoulder bag. I considered the ladies’ room again. I couldn’t remember seeing bathroom windows on the front of the building. Did that mean they opened at the sides?

He laughed. “So do you believe that I’m not, in fact, a serial killer?”

I kept my face neutral. No, he was something much more dangerous. And I had a sneaking suspicion he was probably quite good at his job.

I smiled blandly. “I’m almost convinced.” I stood and hooked my shoulder bag over my arm.

He scowled. “Where are you going?”

“The ladies’ room? I’ve had three glasses of juice.”

He gave me an apologetic little shrug, although he eyed my purse with suspicion. I turned on my heel and walked as casually as I could through the dingy restroom door. Swearing mental apologies to any other girls in the dining room, I shoved the rubber wedge stopper under the door until it couldn’t be budged.

The bathroom was a pink-tiled one-seater with a crank window just over the toilet. I stood on the seat, trying to gauge whether my shoulders would fit through. Glancing outside at the unkempt little side yard between the diner and the garage next door, I turned the window crank. Given the ungodly squealing noise it made, I guessed that it hadn’t been used in a while. Cringing, I glanced over my shoulder, waiting for the sound of Caleb the bounty hunter approaching the door.

I turned the crank again, and it gave a bit, lifting the
window slowly. After a few turns, it was open just wide enough that I could squeeze my head through. After giving it one last rotation for good luck, I zipped my shoulder bag and tossed it through. I carefully stepped on top of the toilet tank, praying it would support my weight while I slithered through the opening.

I told myself it was a game, a claustrophobic version of limbo. How small could I go? Contracting my body into the most aerodynamic shape possible, I slipped my hand into the cool morning air. My head and shoulders slid out easily, but my stomach and hips caught sideways on the ledge, stealing my breath.

“Stupid French toast!” I muttered, wiggling myself free.

I looked down and realized I was a good five feet off the dirt, head down, with no clue how to land safely.

“This was a stupid plan,” I told myself, gritting my teeth against the pressure on my middle, debating if taking my chances with Caleb would have been a better option than giving myself a traumatic brain injury involving a toilet.

Suddenly, my hips worked loose, and I free-fell. I shoved my hands over my head as I flailed my legs. My ankle caught against the sill on the way down, slowing my descent, so I was able to flop down on my back instead of face-planting.

“Stupid, stupid plan.” I huffed, struggling against gravity and my lackluster upper-body strength. “Stupid gravity.”

“Is there a reason you’re hanging out of the bathroom window by your feet?” Caleb asked wryly.

“Dang it!” I cried as my feet lost their tenuous hold against the windowsill.

I dropped, rolling my shoulder against the asphalt and landing with an
uhf
. In a few seconds, Caleb was lifting me by my underarms, my feet barely brushing the ground.

“Well, this is embarrassing,” I grumbled, twisting out of his grip.

Reluctantly, he dropped me to the asphalt, and I yanked my rumpled clothes back into place. “What were you doing?”