Folding his briefs, he placed them carefully atop a stack of clothing on a fallen tree trunk. “You’ve got something for the scent?” he asked Jen.

She nodded, wide-eyed, fishing a boy’s worn and misshapen sweat sock out of her pocket. “Here.”

Iridescent green flashed behind Cody’s eyes. “Hold on to it for me.”

Jen nodded again, wordless.

Cody shifted.

It wasn’t like in the movies, with bones straining, flesh melting, and sinews cracking. I thought it would be, having caught a glimpse of Cody’s self-control faltering when Al attacked me. But this was a deliberate and controlled transition, swift and flawless. One form flowed into another.

One second, naked man. There was the quickest image of him dropping to all fours, his skin pale in the dappled morning light.

The next second, wolf. And I do mean wolf.

Long and rangy in the limb, lean-sided, with tawny-gray fur, a long muzzle full of teeth, and prick-pointed ears. There was nothing human looking out of those amber eyes, but there was intelligence, keen and alert and waiting.

“Show him the sock,” I whispered to Jen.

“You show him the sock!” she whispered back, shoving it at me.

Reluctantly, I took it from her and held it out toward wolf-Cody, letting it dangle from my hand. “Find Brandon?”

The wolf sniffed the sock, crescent-shaped nostrils working, then turned tail and sniffed the ground. It set off down the trail at a steady trot that didn’t look particularly fast, but was. In seconds, it was out of sight.

Clearly, I hadn’t really thought this through.

Jen and I followed at a run, at least until we ran out of trail. Luckily, the wolf had paused to let us catch up to it before it darted into the underbrush. From then on, it got pretty pathetic. We crashed through branches and blundered under them, tripped over vines, squeezed past brambly, thorny bushes. The sun was climbing higher and it promised to be a hot day. I could almost smell the beer and scotch sweating out of my pores, which made me feel even more nauseated.

“God, I really need to join a gym or something,” Jen muttered between gasps. “Do you see him?”

“No.” Straining my eyes, I caught a flicker of tawny movement ahead. “Yeah. Up there.”

“It thins out ahead,” she said. “But it gets grosser.”

“I remember.” When Jen and I had been younger and stupider, we’d explored back here, too. That was how we knew about Meg Mucklebones, although we’d been careful to keep our distance. “Jen, you really need to think about moving out and getting your own place.”

“I know, I know! It’s just—”

“You worry about your mom and Brandon,” I finished for her. “I know.”

She sighed. “Sucks to be me, huh?”

Reaching back, I found her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Yeah, it does.”