maybe at him.
‘If he shifts we have to kill him,’ I said.
Nicky said, ‘Understood.’
Lisandro said, ‘There’s got to be another way.’
Seamus spoke through gritted teeth. ‘She’s right.’
‘You smell like hyena,’ Lisandro said, ‘but you don’t carry that beast.’
‘I do now.’
‘Let him smell your skin,’ Nicky said.
I had to stop touching his arm to put my arm in front of his face. His eyes rolled back into his head, and his energy calmed. When he opened his eyes they were peaceful, he was in there again.
‘He’s not trying to control me anymore.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. It’s like he’s gone. I would have said dead, but I don’t think that’s it.’
‘Gone is good enough,’ I said.
Al said, ‘You’ve set a fire over in the trees there. It’s been a dry year; we need to put that out.’ He looked tired, as if something about the last few minutes had taken a lot out of him.
‘You okay?’ Hatfield asked.
‘I knew the couple who lived here. I don’t want to tell their kids in town that their folks got eaten alive.’
‘Tell them they were murdered,’ I said.
‘The families always ask how, always, as if that will make them feel better.’ Al shook his head. ‘Some truths don’t make you feel better. Some truths just hurt more.’
No one argued with him; we’d all been around violence and death too long to argue with something that true.
63
If Seamus hadn’t been injured we’d have had to stay at the scene longer, but they let us take him to get patched up. I wasn’t risking him in the ambulance; it was too close to the scenario with Ares in the chopper. No one argued with us. I think they thought the same thing. The EMTs put a dressing on his wound to keep him from bleeding all over the car and then let us go. We implied, though didn’t state, that we were taking him to the hospital; we didn’t. I called Claudia from the car and had some of the guards waiting to help take him upstairs. They’d help him shift form and if he went apeshit they’d kill him. If he was calm, they’d let him heal in animal form for a few hours.
We dropped Hatfield at the station for her to pick up her own car and drive home to clean up. The rest of us went to our rooms to shower with the industrial-strength cleaner that Edward and I had both started carrying in our go bags. It smelled like bad fake orange, but it was better than smelling like corpses. It was weird that zombies didn’t smell as bad as plain dead people, but they almost never did. Metaphysics was weird that way.
Edward went to his room across the hall from Nicky and me. Lisandro had a room farther down the hall. The guards on hall duty informed me that Nathaniel was asleep in the room. I asked, ‘And Micah?’ but was told no, just Nathaniel. I had a moment to wonder how Micah and his family were doing and why Nathaniel wasn’t plastered to his side, but then I wasn’t plastered to Micah’s side either and I was his ‘fiancée.’ I opened the door with his key card and tried to be as quiet as possible. The room was dark, the blackout curtains pulled except for that rim of sunlight. If they hadn’t told me Nathaniel was in the bed, at first glance it would have looked like just a pile of covers. When he slept alone he cuddled down like he was making a nest. It was always impressive how invisible he could be in a bed by himself.
Nicky and I threaded our way through all the coffins and past the bed. I might have kissed him if I hadn’t smelled like rotting corpse. I did not want the smell on the sheets. Nathaniel was a heavy sleeper, but to sleep through both the noise and the smell meant he was exhausted. I tried to remember if he and Micah had slept at all in the last twenty-four hours and couldn’t remember, which probably meant, no.
Someone had tidied the bathroom since the last shower that Nicky and I had taken. We had fresh towels, but no soap or shampoo that the hotel had would take care of this smell. I got the bottle of the same all-around body cleanser that they used in morgues, which was actually where I’d first used it on my hands. We’d use Febreze on