Chapter Twelve – Ryder

 

Shifters heal. Shifters shift, and shifters heal. It’s just one of our things. I’d never had a wound from a human not heal up almost instantly. Bullets? Nothing to us, unless they were made of silver. Explosions? I’d been through three IEDs while I was over in the sandbox.

I’d always walked away.

Fire was always the biggest concern for us. Fire destroyed everything. Except, of course, a phoenix. But there was only one of those around, still, that we knew of. And I sure as hell wasn’t it.

This, though? This threw me for a loop. What were those misshapen things prowling Camelot? What had happened to those poor bastards that had made them lose control the way they had, made them transform into those strange half-man, half-cat creatures?

And, goddamn, Jack Daniels hurt as a disinfectant!

“Oh, quit acting like such a damn baby,” Stephanie chided as I recoiled from the touch of the liquor-soaked rag, of the burning fire it seemed to promise every time she brought it near. “We’re almost done.”

I gripped the arms of the chair more tightly as I fought the urge to move, to get out of the way. I breathed deeply, though, accepting the unfamiliar pain.

Because it wasn’t so much that it hurt. I could take that. No, it was that I was actually having to go through it. That I was in the position in the first place of being cleaned up by someone, with my wounds not closing on their own.

Abs clenched, my whole body tensed as if it were ready to pounce, I fought to stay still and just accept the burn I knew was coming. It lit up my side, like an echo of the earlier pain, as Stephanie touched the alcohol-soaked cloth to my side. I managed to stay in one place without wiggling too much. Showing weakness in front of her was the last thing I wanted, even if she did have a cute little smirk on her face.

“Cure’s almost as bad as the sickness,” Stephanie mused as she set the rag aside and began to pull bandages and gauze from the first aid kit.

“Something like that,” I agreed.

“So you’re the expert,” she said as she pulled out the butterfly bandages from the metal case and began to strip one of them of its wrappings and the little paper on the adhesive. “What were those things outside?”

“Don’t know,” I replied, honestly. Truth be told, I’d never seen anything like them in my life, nor had I ever read about them. “I’m as in the dark as you.”

She leaned forward and began to apply the butterfly closures, slightly pinching my skin so it would stay together as it began to heal. Her breath was like its own set of butterflies, though, a set of gentle wings flapping against my chest as she added another, and another, and another closure, her fingers soft and warm against my skin.

I swallowed hard, tried to focus on the pain. Getting wrapped up in some kind of emotional thing with a woman who’d never have anything to do with me wasn’t at the top of my list of things to do.

After all, I was a failure.

Look at me.

Going from a failed ghost investigation in Philadelphia to stumbling onto a case too big for my sorry ass to handle. A bunch of punk bastards turned into wildcats had managed to get the drop on me and the woman I was protecting, and even cut a hole in my side that wouldn’t heal. What was I doing instead of checking on Christina and other people in the town?

Holing up in an old, shitty hotel, having a civilian patch me up.

What kind of Special Forces op was I? I’d been dropped in behind enemy lines, infiltrated hostile territory, made alliances with tribes that had been hostile to western powers and their interests for generations.

And I got cut up by some fucking street cats.

What kind of panther shifter was I? By all rights, I should have torn them apart.

As I’d been lost in my own wallowing, Stephanie had pulled back from my chest and begun to reassemble everything in the little first aid kit. “Think your friend would know?” she asked, glancing in my direction with those sultry, but somehow still girl-next-door, eyes of hers. “The one you were trying to call?”

“If anyone does,” I admitted, frowning a little, “it’s her.”

“Ah,” Esther said as she breezed into the little bar, looking as out of place here as she had behind the counter. One thing I’d noticed about her when we came in, she didn’t seem to be exhibiting any symptoms like Jeff had. But, sickness aside, a calm seemed to fall over me and Stephanie both as she came over to our table. “The rooms are ready, if you two are.”

“Just finishing up,” Stephanie said as she put the last of the bandages away in the kit, gathering up the discarded wrappers and strips of paper. “You ready?”

Nodding, I went to stand and grabbed my shirt from off the table. Both women eyed me as I slipped the plain white shirt down over my head and pulled it over my chest. It was tight, but the material was thin and seemed to stretch easily enough. “Sure thing,” I said.

We followed her out into the hall and down past the lobby, back past all the pictures hanging on the walls. One thing was for sure, my colleague Matthew Jones would’ve had a field day with this place. It was right in his wheelhouse, with all the pictures and sketches of times long gone.

Out in front, the man-cats were still prowling. Still strutting up and down the street, casting glares in our direction. Like we’d batted them down from in front of the TV, and they were contemplating ways to get back at us.

Why they didn’t want to come in here, I had no idea. All I knew was that we were safe, and we could at least have a moment of rest.

She took us upstairs to the second floor, down another hallway. This one didn’t have the wood paneling, but still had the lush emerald carpet from downstairs.

“I took the liberty of clearing out the room next to Ryder’s, Stephanie,” Esther said as we trailed just a few steps behind her.

Stephanie glanced in my direction, smiling a little sheepishly. “Uh, thanks. You really didn’t need to.”

“What about you?” I asked as she handed over the keys to each of us. “You going to be safe downstairs by yourself?”

“Well, if the night up to this point has been any indication, these little ruffians shouldn’t give me any problems. I just hope Chief Boon is able to clear them out come morning.”

“That’s right,” Stephanie said, jingling the keys in her hand a little. “I hadn’t even thought about him. Where the hell has he been in this whole thing?”

“Down at Anderson’s Farm, I imagine,” Esther said. “He and his two deputies were going to help handle security at the event, to the best of my knowledge. At least, that’s what he told me when I saw him night before last.”

I frowned as my hand unconsciously went to my cut side, held together by butterfly enclosures. If I’d had a police scanner, I could have checked in on law enforcement, but even that was down in the Charger. There was an app on my phone, though, and I might be able to pick it up that way.

“Esther?” I asked. “You guys don’t happen to have Wi-Fi here, do you?”

She looked at me like I was crazy.

Oh well, it had been a long shot. “That’s what I thought.”

“Now, if you will excuse me,” she said with a warm smile that easily reached all the way to her eyes, “I have a hotel to maintain. Have a good evening, both of you. And, if you do need anything else, you know where to find me.”

With a swish of her long, flowing skirt, she was back down the hall towards the stairs, leaving Stephanie and me alone together in the hall outside our rooms. She and I exchanged a look after Esther had begun to descend the flight of stairs.

My gut reaction was to go out to the Charger, now that Stephanie was here in one piece.

But, how did I know this place would stay secure?

That she’d remain in just one piece? This was just a hotel, after all, with a middle-aged woman sitting behind the counter with only a shotgun to scare off those creatures. They could come through any of the windows or doors, if they really had a mind to, especially if their proclivities towards being a cat carried over to climbing.

Stephanie folded her arms over her chest and leaned a shoulder against her room door as she fixed me with a knowing stare. “You’re thinking about how you can get out of here, aren’t you? And ditch me?”

“Well…” How the hell did she read my thoughts like that?

Every. Damn. Time.

“Tell you what,” she said, filling the silence when I didn’t speak. “How about you try calling your friend from the landline, see if she can give you some insight into this?” She pushed off from the door with her shoulder and walked over to me. She stopped a few feet away, looking up into my eyes, her smell filling my nose. Liquor, old building, and vanilla. Something about it was strangely appealing. “And I’ll try calling Christina at the same time. She’s got a landline at home, so the signals getting tied up won’t matter.”

“Then what?” I asked, nodding like I had every intention of going along with her plan. “Sit around here and try to come up with something else?”

“Well, maybe Christina’s fine,” she said. “And we won’t have to go tramping through the woods. And maybe your work friend will be able to just wiggle her little finger and make all this magically disappear. Thought about that?”

I frowned. “I don’t think it works that way.”

“Yeah? Thought you said you didn’t know everything.”

I barked a short snort of laughter, my hand already on the doorknob. “Guess I did, didn’t I?”

We separated and, with one more furtive glance at each other, disappeared into our rooms.

The hotel room was smaller than the ones I was used to, with a single queen size bed set against the right wall. A large bay window, the light green curtains closed against the night, dominated the far wall, and off to the right was a door that presumably separated me from the bathroom. There was no TV, only nightstands with lamps and a phone on the side nearest to the bathroom, and a small desk tucked into a corner near an old-fashioned, antique-looking wardrobe.

In a word, it was quaint.

After a moment of deciding the room had exactly what I needed, which was really just the phone, I crossed over to the bed and sat down. I knew it was late, almost pushing four in the morning, but if anything fit the definition of extenuating circumstances, this was it.

I picked up the receiver, hit the key for an outside line, and dialed in Tabitha’s number from memory. I’d never understood the modern human’s obsession with offloading their own responsibility onto technology. Why put all of your memory into a fragile electronic device that goes in your pocket, and could get wet, lost, or stolen? Even with an address book, you were at risk of losing all that information when you most desperately needed it.

With as many burner phones as I had, and as many calls as I’d needed to make from random public places to ensure I wasn’t being bugged, I’d just memorized everything.

As the phone began to ring on Tabitha’s end, I raised my eyes to the ceiling and whispered a thank-you to whatever was up there. A thanks for at least the landlines being clear out of Camelot, even if nothing else was working the way it was supposed to.

I almost retracted that thanks as the tone continued to repeat. And repeat.

“Shit.” It rang one more time till it kicked over to voicemail. “Tabitha, this is Ryder. We’ve got a problem. Stopped overnight in a town in Pennsylvania named Camelot. There’s something going on, and it involves dissolving people, ghosts, an old witch’s curse, and people turning into giant cats and, I think, hunting people.”

I licked my lips a little, took a breath.  “Also, I can’t heal my wounds from them. Cell phones are out, so you’ll have to call me here at the hotel, the Camelot High Street Hotel. Nice little historic place. Call me soon as you get this. Whatever’s going on here is bad. Real bad. Totally fubar.”

I put the phone back in its cradle and propped my knees on my elbows as I leaned forward.

There was no way around it; I was at my wit’s end with this. None of this made any sense.

My only hope was that Tabitha could get back to me in time, and maybe have an idea of what was going on.

Well, that, and if I could manage to get to the trunk of the Charger in one piece. But doing that, without having to shift into my panther form and attract both Stephanie’s and Esther’s attention, was going to be a little bit trickier than just waiting on a returned phone call.

My eyes traveled to the window, seemingly of their own accord.

Maybe my salvation was hidden behind those curtains? After all, I’d always been a climber.