Santi

A sleazy motel just inside the Georgia line was the only place that took cash at four in the morning without asking for an ID. I’d never driven this far from Orlando in my life, and the unfamiliar exit signs had been the only thing keeping me awake for the last hour.

Three buildings of single-story rooms wrapped around a parking lot that hadn’t been repaved in a decade, a vending machine humming somewhere off the breezeway, and the interstate close enough that the eighteen-wheelers shook the floor when they went by. I’d backed the Hyundai into the slot at the far end under the busted streetlight, plate facing the wall, and paid the front desk forty dollars for a room and another twenty so the clerk would forget what I looked like.

I sat on the carpet with my back against the bed frame and the room completely dark.

The whole place smelled like cigarettes and the wet rot of a carpet nobody had pulled up in thirty years. The wallpaper above the headboard was mauve and dusty teal with a gold diamond pattern. The lamp on the nightstand was brass and yellowed at the shade, and a boxy television sat on a particle-board cabinet across from the bed. Nothing in the room had probably been touched since the nineties.

The curtains were pulled most of the way, and a thin line of parking-lot glare cut across the floor at my boots. I hadn’t moved in close to an hour. My senses were dialed up higher than they’d been in years, picking up the ice maker chugging through its cycle in the office at the far end of the lot, the buzz of the dead neon on the sign out front, and the man two doors down fucking the beta he’d picked up off the truck stop on the other side of the interstate.

The suppressants were at least working. I’d drained half the bottle in the lot of a 7-Eleven outside Jacksonville and washed them down with a Gatorade I’d paid for in cash while I filled up the car’s tank. Now I was focused enough to see in the dark, as if the room were lit.

The boots were killing my feet. I kicked them off onto the ugly carpet and dug into my duffel for my sneakers and a clean t-shirt. I stripped the wet lace off my skin, dropping it in a pile beside the bed, and dragged the fresh shirt over my head. The trade-off was the new t-shirt stuck to my back from the sweat running down my temples and a pulse that would have killed a regular human two hours ago.

One and a half bottles left. I’d counted them in the car, lined them up on the dashboard and counted them twice. Four days if I was careful, two if I wasn’t, and I didn’t know what came after the two days.

I pulled my knees up to my chest.

The duffel was on the carpet next to me, slumped against my hip. I’d packed it in eleven minutes in the dark with the deadbolt thrown and the chain on, shoving in every t-shirt I owned and two pairs of jeans, the old hoodie with the thumb holes worn through, Abuela Rosa’s recipe box, the herbal blend in the mason jar, the suppressants, the ID, and the cash.

Fifty thousand, give or take a few hundred. Every dollar I hadn’t spent on rent for the last two years of saving, plus grandma’s money, piled up in a coffee can on top of my fridge and pulled down tonight in one trembling armful. I didn’t know if it bought me a month of running or six, or how long before it dried up and I was sleeping in the Hyundai on a side street somewhere I couldn’t pronounce.

A laugh came up out of me and it wasn’t a good one. I shoved my fist against my mouth and bit down on the sound.

Tyler.

The thought of him crashed over me like a wave I failed to duck under in time. I pressed harder into my knees because if I started crying in this room I wasn’t going to stop.

I never loved him, and I knew it almost from the start. I stayed with him because he was the only person who knew what I was without turning me in. Now I finally understood why. He was just waiting for the price to be right.

It still hurt, and that was the part I despised. My eyes were burning and it still fucking hurt, because Tyler had pulled me out of the walk-in cooler at Maison Auclair and let me sleep on his couch and cooked me eggs on Sunday mornings and held me on the anniversary of Abuela Rosa’s death, and all of it had been a man fattening a calf.

My phone lit up on the carpet.

I’d set it face down beside the duffel and tried to ignore it, but the screen kept flashing white through the gap in the case and throwing a pale square against the side of the bed frame, again and again, every fifteen minutes or so, like a heartbeat refusing to switch off. I picked it up.

Twenty-three missed calls had stacked up since I left the alley behind Threadbare, all from Tyler. The first came about a minute after I drove off, and the latest just two minutes ago. Beneath the calls was a wall of messages. Repetitive, desperate pleas that blurred into a single long apology I refused to fully read. Santi, pick up. Santi, please. Santi, I’m sorry. Santi, I can fix this. Santi, they’re going to find you anyway. Pick up.

I stared at his name on the screen until the letters stopped meaning anything, then I held my thumb to the side of the phone and watched it darken and come back lit.

A new message from an unrecognized number came through with the Kentucky area code. Another one came in before I’d finished reading the first.

Get out of room 14 in the next ten minutes or Genesis Protocol will be there. This is not a joke.

My breath stalled behind my teeth, and every muscle in my body locked tight against the sudden rush of ice in my veins. I’d checked in under a name that wasn’t mine, and I should’ve thrown the phone across the room; instead, I opened the next message. It was a photo taken from a high angle, likely from across the interstate or from an upper room in the building opposite. The image showed a black SUV pulling into the motel lot where I sat, with two men climbing out in dark jackets, ordinary and unremarkable.

Another message followed.

If you want to be caught and bred for the rest of your life, ignore this. If not, follow what I’m about to tell you.

The laugh that came up out of me this time was something closer to a scream that had lost its lungs on the way out. I shoved my fist again into my mouth, and this time I bit down hard enough to taste copper.

I didn’t believe him.

I didn’t believe any of it. Someone might have faked the photo, the whole thing a Genesis Protocol psyop to flush me out of the room. They probably waited in a van in the lot right now, waiting for me to bolt because some asshole on the other end of a Kentucky number had spooked me into the open.

I sat back against the bed frame, pressed the phone face down against my thigh, and breathed through my nose.

A car turned into the lot.

I was on my belly behind the bed before my brain caught up, flat with the phone trapped under my hand and my cheek pressed into the carpet, holding my breath while my pulse hammered in my ears. The tires rolled across the lot far slower than the couple from an hour ago, followed by the quiet cut of the engine and the opening of a car door. A single set of footsteps crunched down off the gravel and stepped onto the breezeway with a terrifyingly unhurried pace.

I lifted my head an inch off the carpet and dragged the curtain back with the tip of my finger.

The werewolf from Threadbare was standing in the parking lot.

Black Henley. Bulky brows. Six-foot-something of registered Primordial Alpha with the cedar-and-musk scent rolling off him strong enough that I caught it through the closed window. He had his hands in his jacket pockets and his head tilted back, scenting the breeze, dragging a single thread out of everything else moving across that lot. His eyes tracked across the row of doors, slowed, and stopped on the Hyundai.

He followed me all the way to the Georgia line. And why would a registered Primordial Alpha be working for Genesis Protocol?

I let the curtain fall.

Fuck.

My hand was shaking when I lifted the phone off the carpet and unlocked it. The Kentucky number’s last message was still open, with a new one above it that had come in while I was at the window.

There’s a tracker in there now. You have less than ten minutes. There are people out here who help shifters in your situation. We monitor Genesis Protocol channels. I’m one of them. You don’t have to believe me. You only have to move.

Below it, the instructions came in one after another, fast enough that one pushed up the screen before I finished reading the last.

Grab something to write with. Take I-16 west to Macon. Pick up I-75 north to Knoxville…

I spun toward the nightstand. There was a cheap motel notepad sitting next to the digital clock with a plastic pen resting on top of it, and I grabbed them both and dropped to my knees on the carpet, scribbling the route down in messy block letters as the messages kept coming in, murmuring the road numbers under my breath while the pen dragged across the paper. Another message popped onto the screen before I’d finished writing the state line, and another after that, and I copied them down as fast as they hit, one interstate after the next, all the way to the final destination.

…into Maine. Exit at Greyhollow. 1847 Tamarack Lane. Cedar house, steel roof, wraparound porch. Last driveway on the right.

I scribbled the rest of the route across the small pages, reading the directions back to myself until the sequence stayed with me on its own.

Then the final message came.

A bear shifter is waiting for you. He’ll get you out of the country. Wipe your phone. Drop it in the bed of the red pickup two rows down from yours. Take the front and rear plates off a car that’s been parked overnight. Swap them onto yours. Good luck, Santiago Vega.

I stared at the messy block letters across the three pages. No, I wouldn’t be able to make it; that was over twenty hours of driving if I never stopped to sleep.

A spark of it caught somewhere behind my sternum, bright and hot and completely terrifying. There was a primordial bear in Maine.

I looked at the duffel slumped on the floor and thought about the one and a half bottles of suppressants packed inside. The math barely worked. The heat was coming on faster than the pills suppressed it, and I had two days at the outside before it broke me open. Two days to push the Hyundai all the way to the Canadian border.

A crushing weight settled onto my chest, stealing my breath. The drive would be a gamble waiting to fall apart somewhere on the interstate. But worse than the distance was the terrifying possibility that the text messages were a trap too. A lie designed to make me hand-deliver myself right into a breeding facility. My fingers trembled over the ripped pages. I considered staying right where I was on the carpet and letting the alpha find me, knowing it would be so much easier to just let it all be over.

No. I took the ripped pages and shoved them deep into the front pocket of my jeans, dragged the duffel onto my shoulder, and pulled the hood of my jacket up over my hair.

I wiped the phone clean on the carpet and watched the screen go black, taking every message Tyler had ever sent me down with it. The dead phone went into my jacket pocket, and I let myself out the side door of the room that opened onto the row behind the building.

The morning was cold and gray and the dumpsters reeked of last week’s garbage. I came up the row from the back, where I heard the werewolf still at the office twenty feet away, telling the clerk he was looking for a friend, average height, Puerto Rican, dark curly hair, would have checked in within the last three hours. The clerk was explaining that she couldn’t share guest information, while he, flirting, insisted that she could.

I came across the lot crouched low between the parked cars and found the red pickup the Kentucky number had named, a beat-up Ford with construction tools roped down in the bed. I tossed the phone over the tailgate and watched it land between a coil of rope and a paint-streaked tarp, swallowed up in the mess and out of sight.

Two rows over, a gray Camry with Georgia plates hadn’t moved in the hour I’d been in the motel. I crouched at the back bumper and let the animal push my claws through my fingertips until they locked into the heads of the screws. I turned them out easily and had the Camry’s plate off in under a minute, carrying it to the Hyundai to do the same on mine before threading the Florida plate onto the back of the Camry.

My hands were steady the whole time, which surprised me, because I’d never stolen anything in my life. Tonight, I’d punched Tyler’s nose into the back of his face right before leaving the alley behind Threadbare, and stolen a license plate before sunrise. The animal under my skin was telling me both of those things were deeply satisfying.

I dropped into the driver’s seat of the Hyundai and put the key in the ignition. The engine turned on the second crank, and I backed out of the slot without my headlights, rolled to the far end of the lot, and turned onto the access road. The motel sign got smaller behind me.

The interstate ramp came up on the right and I took it. Interstate 16 west toward Macon. I drove for ten minutes before my hands started quivering, and when they did, I gripped the wheel until the leather creaked under my knuckles and kept going.