Page 81 of A Malicious Menagerie
“Your maybe-more-than-friend from work?” Nan asks weakly, resolutely not turning her head in the direction of the bloody corpse or the werewolf trailing behind us. Which suits my purposes well, since she would absolutely not approve of me looting a gun from a dead man.
“We’re kind of engaged,” I admit with a wince.
Nan splutters indignantly. “To a wolf?!”
“He’s not always a wolf,” I rush to assure her. “Well, that’s not true. He’s always a wolf. But sometimes he’s a man, too.”
“Anna,” Nan groans, holding a hand to her head like all of my hedging is giving her a migraine. Hopefully she’s taken her heart meds lately, but if not, I’ve got them in her suitcase.
“I told you I’d explain, didn’t I? Trust me.”
“It’s getting harder and harder to do that,” Nan grumbles, making another shot of guilt arrow through me. Still, she’s quiet as I wheel her quickly through the lobby and into the night.
Before I can head for the car, Chase bounds up beside me and presses his snout, followed by something metallic, into my hand. My palm wraps around the jagged edges of a set of keys, and I stare down at them before glancing at my wolf. “Are we stealing a car?” He chuffs before taking off toward our car, presumably to get our bags.
Nan gasps. “Anna!”
Ignoring her disapproval as best I can after a lifetime of trying to avoid it, I click the button on the fob. Headlights flicker in an aged sedan across the lot, and I start that way. Chase is right; we won’t get far in Mathis’s car with its GPS tracker.
It takes some maneuvering, but I manage to get a fuming, worried Nan settled in the front passenger seat. I shove her wheelchair in the trunk, using a shoelace to keep the hatch from flying up when I can’t get it to latch over the bulky frame. I slide into the driver’s seat and close the door. A moment later, Chase ducks into the backseat, newly dressed in my dad’s buffalo check flannel shirt and jeans. He’s scrubbed most of the blood off his face, but he missed a single streak across his forehead. Nan stares at his reflection in the rearview mirror, her eyes boggling again. When Chase catches her gaze in the glass, he grimaces before managing a wan smile. “Hello, Mrs. Paulson. It’s nice to meet you. Sorry it’s under such… strange circumstances.”
Nan blinks rapidly as I start the car and head for the exit. I try not to floor it and draw more attention as police sirens echo in the distance. “You’re Chase?” she says slowly, half a question and half a statement.
“I am.”
“You’re the boy from Anna’s new job.”
Chase hesitates, probably weighing what I likely told my grandmother before now. “I am.”
“And you’re… a werewolf.”
“I am,” he confirms again.
Nan’s sharp eyes fly to me, and I can feel the heat of her regard on the right side of my face. “And you’re engaged.”
“We are,” it’s my turn to say. “It’s a long story.”
“And you promised to tell me.”
“I did,” I sigh. And, as the miles begin to tick by, I do.
* * *
While Chase was imprisoned in the menagerie, he fantasized about his escape and his dramatic return to his pack. Until I told him, he didn’t know where in the world he was being kept, but he still planned various contingencies on how he would make his way home.
“Unfortunately, none of those contingencies accounted for traveling with a woman in a wheelchair,” Chase whispers dryly as we pore over a couple of maps we picked up in a gas station off the highway. We ditched the car back across the state line before it could lead the police to us. Then, we hopped a couple of buses until Nan was too tired to keep her eyes open before finding a cheap motel a few sketchy blocks from the bus station. Now, Nan is sleeping soundly on one rickety twin bed while Chase and I use the other to plot our course.
“It’s a long trip,” I note, daunted by the little scale in the corner of the map that tells me that Fairbanks is about threethousandmiles away… and that’s as the crow flies. “And we had to ditch the car.”
“How much cash do you have?”
I reach into my suitcase to take out the wad I pulled from under my mattress. I grimace at what looks like a paltry amount in light of the journey ahead of us. “About five thousand dollars.”
He grimaces. “Maybewe can find a working car for two or three thousand that won’t fall apart until we reach the border—”
“Theborder?” I hiss. “Did you have your passport tucked somewhere on your naked body all this time?”
“Shit,” he says, conceding my point. “In all my plans, I walked across the border illegally. But we can’t push Nan through the woods and across a huge chunk of Canada.”
