“I don’t want to cause trouble,” he said, and he lied. His dog took a step forward.
I had the big gun out and aimed before the dog took another step.
“I might regret shooting the dog, but I won’t hesitate,” I told Flores.
He did something with his hand, and the big dog stepped back. The air-conditioning kicked in, and the air blew past them and to my nose, bringing with it the faint scent of magic. A faint scent that altered everything because I’d smelled that scent yesterday while I stared at a dead woman in a hayfield. I fought to keep my expression from changing and angled my face a little to the camera.
“You caused a lot of trouble in Finley,” I said, knowing the powerful little lens would catch my lips. Someone would figure out what I had said because there was not a chance in hell that I was coming out of this alive unless Tad or Adam made it here in time. “I saw what you did. Enjoy horsemeat, do you?”
A puzzled look crossed his face as if he were going to deny knowing what I was talking about … and then he smiled. His body language changed as he straightened, like an actor shedding a role. He licked his lips. “Horsemeat is not my first choice, no, but it sufficed at the time.” He liked to talk with his hands. “He understands the message I left in that field, your husband, does he not? I do not recognize his territory, and I hunt freely therein. He has taken she who is mine, so I shall take from him she who is his. Balance. Only then will I take his life—and that is vengeance. There is no one safe from my—”
I shot the dog. A clean killing shot to his head. He dropped without a sound. Alive one moment, dead the next.
Flores staggered back a few steps, clutching his chest almost as if I’d shot him there instead of his dog. He twisted to look at the dog, then turned to me, crouching a little with rage in his face. “You dare.”
“Your fault,” I said coolly, aiming steadily at him and not looking at the poor dog. “You signaled, and he gathered himself for attack. I warned you.”
“My children are immortal,” he told me in a breathless hiss and with theatrics that belonged onstage rather than in the mundane environment of my garage. Christy had been right, there was something European in his accent, but not anything I’d heard before. Vaguely Latinish, maybe, but not any Hispanic accent I was familiar with. The accent added melodrama to his already melodramatic words. “Tied to flesh that can be killed, but that mortal flesh is easily replaced. My son will not die but rise again, and so your efforts to defeat me and mine fail. Even so, you will suffer for this before you die.”
“Your children are immortal?” I asked, repeating the important part of his words for the camera to catch. The first security system had had sound, but when Adam had updated, he’d traded sound for better video. “Tied to mortal flesh. Who are you?”
“Guayota,” he said.
“Coyote?” I asked, and I know my eyes widened. He wasn’t Coyote.
“Guayota,” he said again, and I heard once more the odd pronunciation that Gary Laughingdog had used in the middle of his vision. Not Coyote with a weird accent but another name altogether.
“With a ‘g,’” I said.
But Flores, who called himself Guayota, was done listening to me. “Your husband thinks to keep the sun from me,” he said. “He will regret it.”
Something happened, something that smelled of scorched fabric and magic. I cried out as that heat seared my cheek. But even as the pain made my eyes water, I shot.
I aimed at Flores’s face, and I kept firing until the bullets were gone. Holes appeared in his face as I shot, two side by side in the middle of his forehead, one in his cheekbone. Then I switched targets and two more holes opened up around his heart, the final one a little low and right.
Out of bullets, I grabbed a big wrench and made a backward hop onto the hood of the Passat. It rocked a little under my weight, and I thought that I’d have to remember to tell the owner that it needed work on the shocks, too. Another hop put me on the roof of the car and gave me