Page 18 of Raven's Instinct
Amy looked much happier than she had at Tiny Paws, bouncing in Kendra’s arms. She laughed and grabbed at the towel as Kendra set her in one of the rolling laundry carts and started drying her vigorously.
Alan watched Kendra get Amy dressed and pull a load of clothes out of a dryer. The clothes were swiftly folded, despite Amy’s enthusiastic “assistance.” The old man with the magazine ignored them, but Alan saw him smile.
He didn’t realize that it might be odd of him to still be watching until Kendra plopped Amy into a tightly-packed laundry basket and headed for the door. He’d turned his SUV off, and a dark car on the far curb shouldn’t be remarkable, but Alan still had to resist the urge to sink into his seat and hide.
Kendra went to the back of the van, out of his view, then returned with only Amy. She buckled the girl into a rear-facing car seat in the passenger seat, and then walked around to the driver’s side.
Alan let them pull away and get halfway down the block before he knew he had to follow them, instinct like a weight on his shoulder and his raven pecking annoyingly in his ear.Follow! Sneak!
12
KENDRA
Amy was asleep in her car seat, her neck at an angle that gave Kendra a headache just looking at it. The drive out towards Tabby’s farm was mesmerizing in the dark, and Kendra had to shake herself back to wakefulness several times. The laundromat shower had been long, warm, and decadent after getting so chilled, and now she wanted nothing more than to crawl into her clean pajamas and go to sleep.
But she had promised the bull (she was calling him Ferdinand in her head) to come back that night to check on his injury and try to solve his magical mystery, or at least figure out how to get him help. She told him about the abandoned gravel pit down the highway where she had camped out several times and he had given one of his cartoon-character nods. Kendra suggested that she meet him there near nine, not that he was wearing a watch, and it was a few minutes later that she was pulling down the rough road to find a place out of view of the highway.
Ferdinand was nowhere to be seen as she used a set of leveling blocks to get the van flat enough to run the propane fridge and stove. It wasn’t quite cold enough to justify the heater, and she’d deliberately warmed the living space as they drove. Ifshe was careful about opening the doors, the van would hold the heat long into the night, and her blankets were thick and cozy.
She set up a folding chair outside of the van to wait and see if the bull would show up, listening in case Amy cried. She idly wondered if a phone would run out of power while it was transformed with a shifter for so long. Shifting itself didn’t always make perfect sense if she stopped to think about it too hard, and watches kept time as if theyexistedwhile shifted. Where did her extra weight go? Clothing couldn’t turn into feathers, because she wasn’t bald when she shifted naked. How could something you were holding just vanish and come back?
Just as she was ready to give up and get Amy to bed, hoping that the bull wouldn’t crash her van again to wake her up, instinct gave a little jangle and she heard heavy, uneven footsteps on the gravel.
The bull would have been deeply alarming breaking through the brush if Kendra hadn’t been expecting him. He was enormous in the darkness, and his horns were bright and sharp. He snorted in greeting as Kendra rose to meet him.
“How’s the leg?” she asked. “Better?”
Ferdinand bobbed his head and gave a tired sigh.
Kendra felt better prepared for this one-sided conversation, now that she knew what to expect. “Do you have some family I can contact? Someone who might know how to help you? I wrote letters down on this whiteboard and thought you could point to them so we could get a name and details about how you got this way. Oh, I should add numbers.” She fished a marker out of her coat pocket, but the bull was shaking his head.
“No one?” Kendra said skeptically. “There’s no one I can contact.”
The bull gave a mournful lowing noise and shook his head again.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kendra said, and it seemed natural to reach out and pat his nose.
“So maybe you can tell me how this happened,” she suggested. “Was it a person?”
Kendra had never heard a cow growl before, but this one definitely did. A person, probably.
“So, let’s start with how long you’ve been like this. That wound was probably a week old. Have you been stuck that long?”
The bull shook his head, stretching his nose to the right.
“A month?”
He shook his head again, scooping even harder to the right.
“Ayear?”
The bull’s head bobbed left, but not vigorously. Notthatlong, at least.
“Was it in the winter? Late winter?”
Vigorous shaking of his head.
“Early winter?”
