Captive Mate - Eliot Grayson Page 0,48
of mice.
Mmm. Mice. My nose twitched and my stomach growled.
Maybe later. The dumpster and its little residents weren’t going anywhere, and I might be able to get some human food along the way and skip having to hunt.
The plaza contained a chain pizza joint, a liquor store, a nail salon, and — bingo. One of those work uniform stores that specialized in Dockers. Perfect. A quick trip around the back of the plaza, a tiny application of magic to the lock on the back door and another to the security system to fritz it, and I nosed my way inside.
When I stepped out again, I was fully equipped in sturdy pants and a t-shirt and jacket, with a few changes of clothes in a backpack and a pair of steel-toed boots on my feet. They’d even had cheap sunglasses. I changed my appearance too, using magic to make me look shorter and broader than I was, with shoulder-length brown hair.
The sun wasn’t peeking over the hills yet, but it was fully light, the alley washed gray and dingy by the unforgiving purity of sunrise.
I took a deep breath, holding it in until my lungs burned, and then let it out slowly. I couldn’t smell the mice in this form, luckily, because they weren’t delicious at all to my human taste buds, but the garbage and old pizza remained.
What was Matthew doing right at that moment? I’d been gone for more than two full days, now. Was he looking for me? Did he regret what we’d done? Almost certainly. My belly clenched. Just because I was hungry and tired, dammit. I could still smell Matthew on me, or imagined I could. I wasn’t going to try to catch that scent. I’d take another shower as soon as I could.
Had they written me off as a bad job, called Parker and told him he could look for me elsewhere? Were the Kimballs circling, looking for another opening to take revenge for Sam and Adam’s deaths, the deaths of their pack members in the fight, and their overall resounding defeat?
Not that I cared about the Armitage pack. Fuck them. I only cared about myself, and I needed to know what Parker was doing in order to kill him. That was all.
I needed a car. I needed herbs, salt, chalk, and candles, and possibly a few other oddball items. First I needed food and a place to sleep until night fell, when I’d be free to move.
I slipped down the alley again, just another scruffy drifter wandering the streets at dawn.
***
The Kimball pack had a much larger territory than the Armitages did, and it was a lot closer to civilization, such as civilization was in this part of the country. The northeastern edge of it was only nine miles or so outside of Lancaster.
A little over a mile before the border, there was an abandoned campground. I’d seen it a few times when coming and going from the Kimball territory. Since it was closed, park rangers never went there, and that close to pack land the county sheriffs wouldn’t bother with it either.
It was right after midnight when I crept my stolen Honda sedan down the rutted dirt road, after a quick stop to remove the barrier across the road and then replace it in my wake. I used a little bit of magic to hide the tire tracks. I wasn’t using headlights, relying on my enhanced night vision, and after a while I lost patience, pulled the car in between some trees, and killed the engine. This was far enough from the road to be discreet, but close enough that I’d be able to circle back to the car if I needed more than a bobcat could carry.
Because I had to do my first approach fully shifted, there was no doubt in my mind about that, for all the same reasons fully shifting had been better for escaping from the Armitages. I wouldn’t trigger the wards, my smell wouldn’t attract that much attention, and I was so much quicker and quieter.
I stripped, leaving my clothes in the front seat, and I set the small backpack I’d rigged up with something like a harness on the ground, carefully arranging the straps. It already held the spell components I’d liberated from their captivity in a superstore and in the back of a small herbalist shop earlier that night — and a pair of track pants and a t-shirt, because like fuck was I doing magic