“Hah!” he said, trotting over to me. “Good. I thought we might have lost that in the river.” He reached down and picked up the piece of the river devil.

“I feel like I’m lost in an anime movie,” I said, as Coyote picked the thing up. “One of the tentacle-monster ones.” Most of them were X-rated and ended up with a lot of dead people.

Coyote rubbed the thing he held with his fingers, then pulled my shirt up with one hand, ignoring Adam’s growl and my “Hey.”

Sure enough, there was a swirl of damaged flesh all the way around my waist twice. I’d been afraid to look because these wounds seriously hurt. They looked like acid burns, I decided.

“Mmm,” he said, dropping my cold, wet shirt back down over the burns—which didn’t help, even though the cold should have worked as an anesthetic.

He took the tentacle in both hands and held it up, comparing it to me—and I saw what he had noticed. The chunk he held was about two feet long and it had wrapped twice around my waist.

“Must be elastic.” He started with two fists together and pulled it until he had both arms outstretched. “Yes. Stretchy, all right. What else do we need to know?”

He pulled a knife out of the pocket of his jeans—a smaller, less-threatening knife than the ones he’d pulled on the monster. “Werewolf teeth evidently are sharp enough to make an impression,” he murmured. “But steel?” The blade bounced off the rubbery, gummy thing.

“Here,” he said. “You hold this end on the ground here.” And he grabbed my hand and had me kneel and hold one end of the tentacle while he stretched it out. With tension and the solid earth beneath it, he managed to stick the end of the knife through the flesh.

“Okay. Steel isn’t a good weapon,” he said. “Good to know.”

The small knife went away to be replaced by one of the larger jaggedy knives. Like Gordon’s, the knife was obsidian. It wasn’t as big as I’d first thought, but it wasn’t small, either. It sliced into the tough skin just fine.

“Ah,” he said. “Inconvenient because these things are a pain, and they break. But at least they still work.”

He looked at me.“How are your hands?”

I looked down at them.“Cold. Wet. Fine?”

He grunted and stood up, tucking the piece of tentacle into his belt.“As I thought. Whatever makes that burn stopped as soon as Adam bit through it—otherwise, he’d be feeling it by now. Means it’s magic rather than poison or acid or something. Good for you and Adam, bad for us, I’m afraid.”

“Why?” Adam let me use him to lever myself to my feet. His ears were pinned back, and he’d kept his eyes on Coyote in a way that made me a little nervous.

“Because I can do this.” Coyote pulled my shirt up and set one hand against my bare stomach.

Icy chill spread from his hands—and the burns disappeared, leaving only my pawprint tattoo. He bent down to take a good look at my midriff and grinned at me. “Coyote. Cool tattoo.”

“It’s a wolf pawprint,” I said coolly, jerking my shirt down over it.

“Still mad about the unexpected swim, huh?” he said, whining a little, a noise that would have been more at home coming from a canine throat. “All in the name of information.”

“So why is the magic component bad for us?” I asked.

He looked at me like I was an idiot.“Because we have a sixty-four- to ninety-six-foot monster to kill—and it usesmagic.”

I had a thought.“Can you fix Hank like this?”

He shook his head.“No. He’s not one of mine. But I know someone who can. We’re going to need help here, kids.”

He pursed his lips and tapped his toes impatiently.“I know. We need Jim Alvin and his sidekick, that Calvin kid, to meet us at the Stonehenge at midnight tomorrow. Tell him to bring Hank. I’ll tell him what he needs to do, but he’s not going to believe in me. Sad that a medicine man will believe in werewolves, ghosts, and vampires and won’tbelieve in Coyote, but that’s what it is these days.”

“I don’t have his number.”

“Where’s your cell phone?”

“In the trailer.”

He grabbed my hand and pulled a felt-tipped pen out of an empty pocket and wrote a phone number on my hand.“Here. Call him in the morning. If you don’t, he’ll think I’m just a dream.”

He patted me on the head, ignoring Adam’s low growl. “Go in and get warmed up.” He wiggled his eyebrows at Adam. “I bet you know how to warm her up, eh?”

Adam had very nice big white teeth, and he showed most of them to Coyote.

Coyote veiled his eyes and showed his teeth in return.“Go ahead. Just try it. You’re out of your league.”

I touched Adam’s nose and frowned at Coyote. “You stop baiting him—or I’ll call my mom.”

Coyote froze, his face blank, and I almost felt bad—except that he’d been threatening Adam. After a moment, he inhaled.

“I’ll see you at Stonehenge,” he said, and walked off without a look back.

We were most of the way to the trailer when I saw what Adam had done.

“Wow,” I said.

A rocket bursting out of the window wouldn’t have done more damage. The window and its frame were toast, and a little of the outside skin had been bent up.

At least all the glass was on the outside.“Be careful you don’t step on the shrapnel,” I told him, taking the long way around the trailer to keep him away from it. My tennis shoes might be wet, but they were proof against a few shards of glass.

In the trailer, I stripped out of my wet clothes and put them in the sack with the bloody clothes from earlier.

“I’m going to need clothes,” I said, sorting through my suitcase. When I looked over, Adam had started to shift back to human, so I grabbed clean underwear and a T-shirt and gave him some room.

After I dressed, I found a towel big enough to cover the broken window frame and taped it up using some of the first-aid tape from the kits because I couldn’t find any duct tape. I keep a couple of rolls of duct tape in all of my cars. The first-aid tape wasn’t the wussy kind, though. This was the stuff that needed WD-40 to get off skin once it was taped down. I hoped the repair people would be able to get it off without damaging the trailer further.

If this kept up, I thought, noticing where a spot of blood had dropped on the carpet—it could have come from any number of things in the past forty-eight hours—we might just be buying a trailer soon. While I was staring at the stain, Adam spoke.

“You could have died.” His voice was rough from the change.

“So could you have when Hank shot you,” I said, trying not to sound defensive when he hadn’t yelled at me. Yet. Adam wasn’t the only one who had to learn not to get mad about something that hadn’t happened.

He wasn’t completely human yet. He knelt on the carpeted floor on the far side of the trailer, his head bowed as he waited for the last of the change.

Even when he was finished, he stayed there, his back to me.“I cannot …” he began, then tried again. “When I heard you scream, I thought I’d be too late.”

“You came,” I told him in a low voice. “You came, and I am fine. When you were shot, I would have killed the man who took your life and not cared. Not even knowing it was not his fault would have made me feel bad about it.” I took a deep breath. “And when I knew you’d be okay, I wanted to yell at you for not moving faster, for not being invincible.”

“What inhell were you doing in that river?” He still wasn’t looking at me, and his voice had dropped even further.

“Trying to get out of it as fast as I could,” I assured him fervently. I could feel his emotion, a huge tangle I couldn’t decipher except to sense the atavistic power of it. “Adam, I can’t promise not to get into trouble. I managed it for most of my life, but these last couple of years have more than made up for it. Trouble seems to follow me around, waiting to club me with a tire iron. But I’m not stupid.”

He nodded.“Okay. Okay. I can deal with not stupid.” But he still didn’t turn around. And then he added in a quiet voice, “Or I hope so.”