Pack Leader was salivating. A long string of slobber fell from his muzzle onto her cheek. “Hate human. Human kill coyote.”
“Stay out of towns and no one kill coyote,” Lana argued.
“All for coyote. All for Pack Leader. No human.” With his strained, unworldly voice, Pack Leader couldn’t really rant for long, but the fury and hatred came through in very few words. She didn’t know what a sane coyote would sound like if it could talk, but there was no doubt in her mind that this was an insane coyote.
Animals didn’t get grandiose ideas about obliterating a whole species. That thought had not come from Pack Leader. Animals thought about food and survival and procreation, if they thought at all.
The thing in the cave. The Darkness. Pack Leader was its victim, as well as its servant.
The Darkness had filled Pack Leader with this evil ambition. But it had not been able to teach Pack Leader the ways to take on the humans. When Lana appeared at the gold mine, the Darkness had seized the opportunity to use her.
There were limits to the power of the Darkness, no matter how terrifying it might be. It needed to use the coyotes—and Lana—to carry out its will. And there were limits to what the Darkness knew, as well.
She knew what she had to do.
“Go ahead, kill me,” Lana said. She arched her neck, presenting it for him, defiant. “Go ahead.”
One quick bite and it would all be over. She would let the wound bleed. She wouldn’t heal it but would let her arteries pump her life out onto the desert sand.
At that moment, part of Lana wasn’t sure she was bluffing. The Darkness had opened a door in her mind, a door to something almost as frightening as the Darkness itself.
“Go ahead,” she challenged the coyote. “Go ahead and kill me.”
The coyote leader faltered. He let loose an anxious, mewling sound. He had never caught helpless prey that did not struggle for life.
It was working. Lana pushed Pack Leader’s wet muzzle away. She stood up, her ankle still painful.
“If you’re going to kill me, kill me.”
Pack Leader’s brown and yellow eyes burned holes in her, but she did not back down. “I’m not afraid of you.”
Pack Leader flinched. But then his eyes went to Patrick, and back, with a sly sideways leer. “Kill dog.”
It was Lana’s turn to flinch. But she knew instinctively that she could not show weakness. “Go ahead. Kill him. Then you’ll have no way to threaten me.”
Again Pack Leader’s scarred face showed confusion. The thought was complicated. It was a thought with more than one move, like trying to play chess and anticipate what would happen two or three moves further on.
Lana’s heart leaped.
Yes, they were stronger and faster. But she was a human being, with a human brain.
The coyotes had changed in some ways from what they had been: some had muzzles and tongues that now allowed tortured speech, and they were bigger than they should have been, stronger than they should have been, even smarter than they had any right to be. But they were still coyotes, still simple, driven by hunger, by the desire for a mate, by a need for a place within the pack.
And the Darkness had not taught them how to lie or bluff.
“The Darkness says you teach,” Pack Leader said, falling back on familiar territory.
“Fine,” Lana said, her brain buzzing, trying to decide where to lead this conversation. Looking for the advantage. “You leave my dog alone. And you get me some decent food. Some food that humans eat, not filthy half-chewed rabbits. And then I’ll teach.”
“No human food here.”
That’s right, you filthy, mangy animal, Lana thought as the next move fell into place. No human food here.
“I noticed,” she said, tamping down the triumph in her voice, keeping her face carefully neutral, giving nothing away. “So take me to the place where the grass grows. You know what I’m talking about. The place where the patch of green grows in the desert. Take me there, or take me back to the Darkness and tell the Darkness you cannot control me.”
Pack Leader didn’t like that, and he expressed his frustration not in human speech but in a series of angry yipping sounds that reduced the rest of the pack to anxious skulking.
He twisted away from her in a pantomime of frustration, unable to control or hide his simple emotions.
“See, Mom,” Lana whispered as she pressed healing hands on her ankle. “Sometimes defiance is a good thing.”
Finally, without a word, Pack Leader trotted off toward the northeast. He moved, and the pack followed, but slowly, at a pace that Lana could match.
Patrick fell into step beside his master.
“They’re smarter than you, boy,” Lana whispered to her dog. “But they’re not smarter than me.”
“Wake up, Jack.”
Computer Jack had fallen asleep at the keyboard. He was spending nights in the town hall, working to deliver on his promise of assembling a primitive cell phone system. It wasn’t easy. But it was fun.
And it took his mind off other things.
It was Diana who had awakened him, shaking his shoulder.
“Oh, hi,” Computer Jack said.
“That computer keyboard face? It’s not a great look for you.”
Jack felt his face and blushed. There were imprints of the square keys on his cheek.
“Big day today,” Diana said, moving across the room to the small refrigerator. She pulled out a soda, popped it open, raised the window shade, and drank while looking down at the plaza.