Page 67 of Way of the Wolf

Yawning, I parked in a staff spot, glad to see Bolin’s hoity-toity SUV already there. By the time I’d been able to call him, he’d long since finished getting stitches in the ER and returned home. He’d been groggy on the phone and said he would talk to me in the morning, after acquiring coffee.

My wounds twinged as I eased out of the truck, and I wished I could rub pain-relief cream all over myself and sleep for a week. That wouldn’t happen, but maybe I would get lucky and nobodywould fill out a maintenance request today or come to complain about a noisy neighbor.

“Doubtful,” I muttered.

Bolin stood in front of the office door with his two cups of coffee in hand, a black eye, and stitches above his eyebrow. I winced in sympathy. Webothneeded pain-relief cream.

“Sorry about the case,” he said. “I shouldn’t have brought it into this neighborhood at night.”

Somehow, I doubted theneighborhoodhad been the problem. Crime might have been increasing a bit of late, but I still believed it had been a werewolf who’d attacked him.

“I shouldn’t haveaskedyou to bring it. It was safer where it was.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry you got clobbered.”

“Me too.”

Surprisingly, Bolin offered me one of the coffees, the one in a simple paper cup with a flat lid. The iced whatever topped with whipped cream he clutched possessively to his chest.

“I thought you always got two for yourself,” I said.

“I do, but you look even rougher than I do this morning.”

I considered his tousled hair, stitches, black eye, and the slump to his shoulders.

“That’s concerning.”

“Yup. Did you sleep in the woods?” His gaze drifted toward a spot above my eyebrows.

My ponytail had long since fallen free, and my hair hung in tangles around my shoulders. I swept my hand back from my forehead, dislodging a few fir needles and a scale from a pine cone. The movement made my shoulder twinge, and I remembered my fall from the bridge. I’d been lucky not to break every bone in my body—or be shot. Fortunately, the bite wounds in my leg and hipweren’t that bad. The locket had to have helped, at least in some minor way.

“I didn’t sleep at all actually,” I said.

“But the woods were involved, right?”

“The depths of the forest.”

“A logical place to go in the middle of the night.”

“For some.” I accepted his coffee offering, taking a deep swig in case I needed to be alert that morning. A surprising hit of sweetness bathed my tongue. It was a mocha, the kind of thing I’d consumed in my twenties but that would now send my blood sugar levels on a roller coaster. Oh well. At least it seemed to have some extra shots of espresso in it.

“Being an intern here might not be as bad as I thought.”

“Given how your night went, I’m surprised to hear that. What changed your mind?”

“You’re weirder than I am.”

“That’s a plus?”

“You hardly ever stare at me like I’m a freak.”

No, a kid with druid blood wasn’t that strange when compared to someone who turned into a wolf and howled at the full moon.

“I’ve met some quirky people in my life,” was all I said, wondering how long it would take him to figure out that I was one of them.

“Oh, there goes Mr. Davis.” Bolin pointed toward the man with the plumbing and mold problem we’d been addressing. Bolin must have texted him, asking for permission to enter today, because a response popped up on his phone. After reading it, he said, “I can show you his apartment. It’s all done.”

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