help until I knew more about what was going on. My gaze dropped and rested on a photograph in a wooden frame set out beside the list.
A younger Jesse grinned at me with a baseball bat over her shoulder and a cap pulled a little to one side.
Jesse.
I snatched up my rifle and sprinted up the stairs to her room. She wasn't there. I couldn't tell if there had been a struggle in it or not-Jesse tended to live in a tumult that reflected itself in the way she kept her room.
In coyote form, my senses are stronger. So I hid both of my guns under her bed, stripped out of my clothes, and changed.
Jesse's scent was all over the room, but I also caught a hint of the human who'd confronted Mac at my garage last night. I followed the trail of his scent down the stairs because Jesse's scent was too prevalent to find a single trail.
I was almost out the door when a sound stopped me in my tracks. I temporarily abandoned the trail to investigate. At first I thought perhaps I had only heard one of the pieces of overturned furniture settling, but then I noticed Adam's left front paw had moved.
Once I saw that, I realized I could hear the almost imperceptible sound of his breathing. Maybe it was only the sharper senses of the coyote, but I would have sworn he hadn't been breathing earlier. If he was alive, there was a very good chance he'd stay that way. Werewolves are tough.
I whined happily, crawled over the wreckage of his table, and licked his bloody face once before resuming my search for his daughter.
Adam's house is at the end of a dead-end road. Directly in front of his house is a turnaround. The SUV I'd seen take off-presumably with Jesse-had left a short trail of burning rubber-but most cars have very little individual scent until they grow old. This one had not left enough behind for me to trail once the tang of burnt rubber faded from its tires.
There was no more trail to follow, nothing I could do for Jesse, nothing I could do for Mac. I turned my attention to Adam.
That he was alive meant I really could not contact his pack, not with him helpless. If any of the dominants had aspirations to become Alpha, they'd kill him. I also couldn't just bring him to my house. First, as soon as someone realized he was missing, they'd check my place out. Second, a badly wounded werewolf was dangerous to himself and everyone around him. Even if I could trust his wolves, there was no dominant in the Columbia Basin Pack strong enough to keep Adam's wolf under control until he was well enough to control himself.
I knew where one was, though.
Chapter 5
A Vanagon resembles nothing so much as a Twinkie on wheels; a fifteen-foot-long, six-foot-wide Twinkie with as much aerodynamic styling as a barn door. In the twelve years that VW imported them into the US, they never put anything bigger in them than the four-cylinder wasser-boxer engine. My 1989 four-wheel-drive, four-thousand-pound Syncro's engine put out a whopping ninety horses.
In layman's terms, that means I was cruising up the interstate with a dead body and a wounded werewolf at sixty miles an hour. Downhill, with a good tailwind, the van could go seventy-five. Uphill I was lucky to make fifty. I could have pushed it a little faster, but only if I wanted to chance blowing my engine altogether. For some reason, the thought of being stranded by the roadside with my current cargo was enough to keep my foot off the gas pedal.
The highway stretched out before me in gentle curves that were mostly empty of traffic or scenic beauty unless you liked scrub desert better than I did. I didn't want to think of Mac, or of Jesse, scared and alone-or of Adam who might be dying because I chose to move him rather than call his pack. So I took out my cell phone.
I called my neighbors first. Dennis Cather was a retired pipefitter, and his wife Anna a retired nurse. They'd moved in two years ago and adopted me after I fixed their tractor.
"Yes." Anna's voice was so normal after the morning I'd had, it took me a moment to answer.
"Sorry to call you so early," I told her. "But I've been called out of town on a family emergency. I shouldn't be gone long-just a day