The third pair didn't fit as well as the second one had, but they had pockets that worked. I could live with them. If they bothered me too much, I'd just wear them to work until they were ripped and greasy enough I didn't feel bad throwing them away.
I had fifteen minutes to pay and get out to the parking lot. I hung up the rejects and pulled my own pants on. I buttoned them just as something dropped onto my shoulders, knocking me to my knees. I caught a glimpse of a blade in the mirror and grabbed the hand that held it even as I fell.
I jerked my head back hard and pulled the hand forward at the same time--connecting with some body part that was also hard, a chin, I thought, though I couldn't be sure. Her chin, because it was a woman's body that had hit me. I slammed her wrist on the wooden bench along the back wall, and the brass-bladed knife fell out of her hand.
I dropped my hold on her, grabbed the knife, and tossed it back up through the hole in the ceiling she'd come from: I didn't want to be caught with a knife in Wal-Mart. I was the wife of the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack--knife fighting was not an acceptable activity. If she tried to crawl back up there and get it, I'd use the time to run out to the main store, where cameras could catch me defending myself against an armed foe.
"You leave her be," she said. "Finders, keepers. She belongs to us."
The river devil? I thought, but I had no chance to ask her.
She ignored the knife and threw herself at me. I let her momentum pull me to my feet and carry us into the larger area between the changing rooms. The big mirror showed me her face--it was the odd woman who'd been staring at Adam and me the day before yesterday at the restaurant. I'd been right. She had been fae--more specifically water-type fae, because she smelled of it. Dollars to doughnuts, she was one of the otterkin.
She fought like an otter, too. Coming in close-- inner circle--fast and furious, trying for my throat with fingernails and teeth. Fortunately for me, we were not in the water, and she was not an otter but a fae--though she smelled like both.
Glamour has never made sense to me. It is a kind of magic the fae use to change their appearance. According to Zee, the ability to use glamour is what makes a fae a fae instead of some other kind of thing that uses magic. Glamour is an illusion--but not. Because with glamour, a twenty- five-pound otter is a hundred-and-forty-pound woman.
Tactics that work really well for an otter don't work as well for a human, not even a human with a knife--particularly since I have a brown belt in karate. I was not helpless. The thought that Adam would never again let me out without a keeper if I got hurt made me determined to win this fight.
In the couple of minutes we engaged, I ended up with a bunch of bruises--including what was going to be an awesome shiner from where she ran me into a doorknob--a split lip, and a bloody nose. On the other hand, I broke her nose, and while she grabbed it, I got a really good kick into her ribs. If she didn't have a broken rib out of it, she had one or two cracked ones, which should slow her down some.
I heard the footsteps behind me and the flushed face of the formerly bored changing-room lady appeared. At the sight of us, she exclaimed, "What's going on here?"
The otterkin woman screamed--not in terror but in anger. Then she turned into an otter and ran up the wall into the ceiling and was gone.
As the fae woman's scent faded from here to was here, I turned to the clerk. Her mouth was opened unattractively as she stared up at the ceiling.
"You don't get paid enough to deal with this," I told her firmly. I didn't borrow authority from Adam for fear that it would worry him, but I know how it sounds and can imitate it when I have to.
"She's gone and won't be back." I looked around, and except for a dent in the drywall where her knee had hit the wall, there wasn't any extra damage. There was blood all over, but I was betting that Wal-Mart had cleaners to get all sorts of things out of their carpets.
I grabbed the jeans I wanted as well as the T- shirts. I put the darkest T-shirt up to wipe my nose. It hadn't been a hard hit, and it had mostly stopped bleeding. "I'll just go pay for this," I said. "You can put those other jeans back where they go, then call someone in to clean up."
I walked out like I knew what I was doing and paid for the clothes--with cash so there was no awkward name-left-behind-at-the-scene-of-the- crime thing. The clerk was too occupied looking at my split lip to notice that one of the shirts was bloody. As I took the receipt, I noticed a general migration toward the changing room on the part of the employees. At least one of them looked old enough to be a person of authority.
I smiled at the clerk and tried to look innocent, grab my bags, and make a quick getaway.
"Honey," said the cashier, who was half my age. "You get rid of that man. You don't have to put up with being a punching bag."
"It was a woman," I told her. "And you are absolutely right."
I walked briskly out of the store and kept going across the parking lot as I called Adam. "I saw a sandwich shop in the little mall above Wal-Mart," I told him. "I'll meet you there."
"It's a little early for lunch," he said. We'd eaten breakfast just before he'd dropped me off at Wal- Mart.
"You're a wolf," I informed him. "You can eat anytime."
"What did you do?" I heard a siren and hoped that it wasn't someone coming looking for me. I made my brisk walk a little brisker. "Got in a fight with my girlfriend, apparently." I hung up before he could ask me anything else.
The nice lady at the sandwich shop had been happy to fill a plastic bag with ice and accepted my story about a jealous girlfriend with a sympathetic ear (I kept my wedding ring hidden). She made me two large chicken sandwiches, and I paid for them and a pair of juices.
When Adam drove up, I was watching the police cars at Wal-Mart--it must have been a slow day-- with the ice bag wrapped in my new bloodstained black T-shirt. Bloodstains on a new black shirt were more a matter of texture and smell than color.
"I think we ought to go back to the camp," I told him.
He pulled the ice down from my eye and took a good look before he let me put it back up again. Then he examined my hands, and brought my free hand up to his lips so he could kiss the bruises. He led me to the truck and buckled me in.
It was a good thing that there weren't many cars in the parking lot, or he'd never have gotten the big truck back out of it. I never had that problem with my Rabbit.