Misery County

Chapter 11 - Part 3

"What? You were supposed to be watching him!"

"Was I, Eric? Was I? Do you think telling me that before he escaped would have been more prudent?"

Eric pulled himself to his feet and marched over into the next room. "Yep, he's gone. Great work, Cassie," he said, throwing his arms into the air.

"How the hell is this on me?"

"Let me paint a picture for you. I was at the end of the other room, trying to pull off a floorboard. You were standing in the doorway, doing fuck all. Now tell me, which one of us was more suited to keeping an eye on our little kidnap victim?"

Cassie was already running up the stairs. "If we're going to talk about poor practice, then where does cutting into me for something that's already happened instead of looking for the skin-walker sit on the spectrum? Come on, I'll look upstairs while you look downstairs."

Eric was enraged, but he knew she was right, so he took off, checking each of the rooms on the ground floor. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

"He's not down here," Eric called out, still hearing Cassie's footsteps on the creaking wooden floor from upstairs. "I'm gonna go check outside. Hopefully he was too drugged up to get far."

"Sounds good," she called back.

Launching himself out the back door, Eric's heart took a moment to rest when he saw a naked man with a mohawk crawling away a few yards from the exit. Well, crawling was what he was trying to do, but it seemed more like he was slithering. No, even that was too grandiose a description for his slug-like advancing.

"I see the tranquilizer hasn't quite left your system," Eric said playfully.

The man slowly turned his head to look at him over his shoulder. If he didn't have an elephant's dose of drugs running through his bloodstream, his facial expression might have been scared or angry, but instead, it showed barely any sign of life or intelligence.

Eric closed in on him, grabbing his hair with his right hand and pulling him up to his knees. The skin-walker hung heavy in Eric's grip.

"Wow, that good shit really knocked you out, huh," he said. "With how smacked you are, really, I should be charging you. I'm not a charity, am I?"

The man didn't respond. He couldn't respond.

Cassie had either finished upstairs or heard the commotion, because now she too was coming out the back door.

"Wow, this is a bit lewd," she said. "I liked him more in that cute li'l coyote form."

"Speak for yourself," Eric said as he tossed the man over his shoulders. "I don't find him cute in any form. Argh, I think his dangly bit just touched my face."

Cassie laughed an unsympathetic laugh. "Third base already and you've only just met. Why, Eric, I never took you for that sort of guy, least of all with another gent."