Wild Side (Dark Side Series: Book 2)

Thirty

Bottom of the River -- Delta Rae

Four days of driving cross-country had made a handful of things clear:

1. Tasha had a bone to pick with my grandmother. Seeing as my grandmother was nothing but bones (I hoped), picking with her had become picking on me.

2. Tasha couldn't quite describe the rules when it came to what my grandmother had instructed her to do, but it seemed to do with a feeling, a protective instinct. It'd kicked in only once so far, when Zakar demanded a detour through West Virginia to dredge up an old, wooden tobacco pipe from a fallen mine. Tasha, singing like a canary the entire time, whisked me out just minutes before a collapse. When she wasn't hungry or disgusted, the look in her eyes held the same, pitying shine of someone who had scraped a puppy's hollow bones off the streets hours before death, knowing that all the love and care in the world couldn't save it.

3. Zakar was an ass. This wasn't unclear before, but Tasha and I had just surrendered the freedom of a vehicle to hitch a ride on an Amtrak train running from Louisville to Houston. I didn't like being around other people any more. I didn't realize it until we'd parked the car and waited in line for tickets. Tasha was dead, of a kind, and the thought of her, the smell of her, the movements of her, had never quite drawn my eye.

And then the humans came, flocking to the trains, wearing perfume and sweat and other scents I'd never been able to identify before but was suddenly acutely aware of. And so, so many eyes were down on their cellphones, or focused on the arrivals and departures, or tucked away into a good book or magazine.

Tasty, tasty cattle, loading on and off the trains. Angus, Holstein, Galloway, Longhorn...Whatever you want, baby. Any cut, any temperature. Yours for the taking.

I'd waited a moment, searching the forest of luggage and legs for a slinking little cat.

And then it'd hit me, hit me so hard I went up to the window and forgot to give a destination. Tasha rolled her eyes and elbowed past me.

Zakar  hadn't said such a terrible thing; I was thinking it. They weren't people; they were meat.

I threw up before our train arrived, and within the first ten minutes of movement, had rushed off down to the cramped little stall to cough watery spit into the toilet.

It's okay, came the sudden voice around my ankles, a velveteen brush against my knee. The squat-faced cat grinned up at me. Every wendigo goes through this.

"I'm really hungry," I said, clutching my stomach. "It's never been this bad."

The more you eat, the quicker it goes, he said. With tiny paws he stretched up and reached for the door handle. Come on now, Mirelle. Let's curl up in a comfy chair. You can call me you're emotional support animal.

"I'm not gonna change, am I?"

No, the cat said brusquely. But you've got to stop eating McDonald's. That's not real beef.

"Funny," I said, but I was thinking about the pink juice running through a lightly charred patty. And that juice turned to the iced chill of a dead deer. I wiped my mouth on a paper towel and straightened my shirt. "Alright, fine. No more fast food."

We'll get you hunting out in Texas. Call up your sheriff. He's familiar with the territory. He'll let you know where all the good hunting grounds are.

I made it back to Tasha, with the cat settling into my messenger bag. He slipped out of it to curl around our legs, duck underneath the seats to swat the exposed ankle of a heavyset man in front of Tasha who'd been snoring since he'd sat down.