“Practice, Ben. Patience.”
He turned slightly, rubbing his cheek against my head, and I thought he might say something. I thought he might talk it out until this made some kind of sense. Instead, he abruptly broke away from me and stalked back to the road.
Tony watched him leave. “How’s he doing really?”
“Oh, just fine,” I answered lightly. “That’s the scary part.”
I couldn’t imagine what Ben would be like if he were handling this really badly.
Side by side, Tony and I followed Ben back to the road. I tried to pin Tony down, studying him out of the corner of my eye. Despite the weirdness of the area, despite having spent most of the morning with a couple of werewolves, he didn’t seem tense at all. He kept his head up, his gaze out, looking around at the trees, the top of the hills, the sky, watching everything just in case something interesting chanced by.
I didn’t make him nervous, and that was refreshing.
“Did Ben tell you where he’d seen this before?” Tony asked.
“That job in New Mexico,” I said. “The one that blind-sided him and Cormac. They kept thinking there were two werewolves, but the evidence didn’t add up.”
“So one werewolf, and one something else? That narrows it down.”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed. Tony smiled in reply.
“One more question,” he said. “Cormac said he’d meet me here. What happened?”
That one was a little harder to answer, because I wasn’t sure myself. The tension had gotten thick. Then it had twisted, gone weird somehow. When we either couldn’t stop glaring at each other, or couldn’t look each other in the eye, something had to break.
I hadn’t realized I’d let my hesitation stretch into a long silence until Tony answered for me.
“Ah—you and Cormac, and then you and Ben—”
“There was never a me and Cormac,” I said.
“Oh. Okay.”
He didn’t sound convinced, and I declined to argue the point further. The lady doth protest too much, and all that.
Another car was parked on the shoulder, right behind mine. I recognized it; I’d seen it all too often the last week or so. Sheriff Marks’s patrol car. His arms crossed, Marks leaned on the hood of his car, staring down Ben, who leaned on the back of mine, staring back.
“Who’s that?” Tony asked as we made our way over the barbed-wire fence. Marks turned to watch our progress, his expression even more hooded and suspicious than ever.
“Sheriff Avery Marks. The local stalwart defender of truth, justice, and the American way.”
“Hm, one of those.”
“Norville,” Marks called. He’d dropped the “Ms.” I knew I was in trouble now. “May I ask what you’re doing trespassing on Len Ford’s land? Trying to clean up a little mess?”
I couldn’t quite think of a response that wouldn’t get me arrested on the spot. If he’d been five minutes later he wouldn’t have seen us, and it wouldn’t have been an issue. His timing was impeccable.
A bit too impeccable. “Have you been following me?” I said.
I didn’t think it possible, but his frown deepened. “I have the right to keep a suspect under surveillance.”
Ben straightened, pushing off from the car. “Your ‘surveillance’ is coming awfully close to harassment, Sheriff.”
“You going to sue me?”
Ben only raised his brow. Marks didn’t recognize the try me look, but I did.
Oh, this was going to get ugly.