Chapter Three
I blinked open my eyes, staring into the face of a massive gray cat. It crouched on my chest, squishing the oxygen from my lungs and watching me with its tail flicking back and forth. It took me a few seconds to recognize the beast as the one guarding the register at Cat’s 24-Hour Drugstore.
Moving very slowly, I pulled my camera from the nightstand, adjusted the lens, and snapped a photo of the glaring cat.
“How did you get in here, kitty?” I set my camera down and reached out to scratch the feline’s head, but the cat hissed, jumped off my chest and hurried off the bed, surprisingly agile for its size. It jumped up onto the old porcelain tub and pounced onto the windowsill, scurrying out of a window I secured last night with locks I installed myself. There was a swooshing sound, followed by a click.
Tension squeezed my muscles tight as I scurried out of bed, running into the bathroom. Ignoring my full bladder, I balanced on the porcelain rim of the tub and checked the window. It was closed. Not only that, but my steel security bracers were also in the window tracks, and the window locks were all still engaged.
“Magic cats.” I shook my head. Now I’d seen everything. Clearly, the fat drugstore cat was not only a key guarder, but he was also an opener of windows. I jumped down off the tub and as I gripped the porcelain lip my palm ached with a sharp, throbbing pain.
“No…,” I groaned, long and loud as I raised my hand to the light. It had taken me twenty minutes of agonizing pain while I plucked glass shards out of my palm before I let Clive suck my wound closed. The skin of my hand was as smooth and untarnished as it had been before I lifted the glass to the alpha’s throat, but when I pressed down on the skin, it gave a twinge of pain.
Fuck.
I must have missed a shard.
If it was just my hand, I’d have said fuck it. I’ll deal with the pain, no big deal. But once I hit Mt Hood, I had to run over four hundred miles as the crow flies on four paws. There was a very good chance that I would be hunted like quarry as soon as I hit Washington.
I stood there next to the tub, staring at the old wooden window frame and the lace curtains, really wanting to smash something.
“Smashing things is what got you into this, Teagan,” I muttered. Anyway, it would be pretty ungrateful if I messed up Clive’s hotel. He’d only got a few ounces of blood from me before my wound had closed. Werewolves healed fast.
The Sanguine Inn had a definite theme to it, and that was frilly Victorian ladies’ parlor. The room Clive had escorted me to last night was the pinkest room I’d ever seen in my life. If a highly gendered girl’s baby shower had sex with a cupcake shop, room number seven at the Sanguine Inn would be their unholy baby. The decor didn’t even seem forced. It was as if the hotel had just kept its original fluffy amenities in tip-top shape for the last century and a half. Everything was frilly or delicate or painted. Even the toilet paper holder had flowers painted along its length.
The clothes I’d washed and hung to dry last night were stiff to the touch. I folded each as I repacked them in my bag, careful not to wrinkle them, even though I’d be abandoning everything I owned soon enough.
The Sanguine Inn was dark and quiet as I headed down the stairs, which was, unsurprisingly, the opposite of how I’d found it last night. Rooms had been thrown open, music from every era had been blasting through the hallway, and people chatted in the doorways with bottles in hand. Now the hallways were silent as a graveyard and no one sat behind the carved heavy wood counter in the front parlor.
Early morning light broke over the ridge of pine trees to the east, and the air smelled like fresh coffee and bread, making my stomach churn with hunger. I had eighty-seven dollars in the world, and likely, that would all be needed for my travel out of here. Food was something I could hunt for in the forest. Still, I took greedy inhales of the sweet, yeasty scent as I headed down the hill and into the area I fled last night.
The street that had so recently been filled with motorcycles and live music now held the strangest farmers market I’d ever seen.
There was nothing outwardly magical about the sellers or the customers that I could see. Most of the farmers and sellers wore thick canvas work clothes, with dirt crusting their boots, but their wares were anything but normal. Families walked around open market stalls where vendors offered bottles of bubbling chemical compounds, berries the size of watermelons, jars of glowing light, and antiques that claimed to be haunted. I gave the antique stall a wide berth, circling a group of children that were running around the stalls with their faces dripping with strawberry juice—at least I hoped it was strawberry juice.
I slowed by a stall that proclaimed to sell lotions with all-natural ten-day glamours. A photo book of models and the words: “Pick Your Glamour” sat next to the bottles.
“So, let me get this straight, if I put on one of these lotions, I’d look like a person I choose in this book?” I asked the older man behind the stall counter.
“Yep.” He stepped up to the table. “That’s the idea, yeah. You’d smell, look, feel, and sound like them too. This row would fool someone who didn’t look hard. This
