Wild Side (Dark Side Series: Book 2)

Six

When I checked my bag to fish out my heels, I found a phone number scrawled on a small slip of paper beside the red straps. While I was certain that August hadn't at this moment followed Cal all the way to some random Brazilian beach, when it came time to reach Mila, I thought twice about my own phone and borrowed Luciano's instead. He didn't mind, wasn't even adverse to the idea that he might have to disappear for a while. 

"I've been this handsome for seventy years," he'd said, pulling his cell from his back pocket. The screen glow brightened his reassuring smile. "My kind are used to laying low and moving on every couple years." 

"For good reasons?" I added, raising an eyebrow.  I lifted the phone to my face.

He shrugged and started to speak. Cal's breathy voice rolled across the speakers and drowned him out in my ear. She agreed to grab Mila from Luiza's house and watch her for a few days, as long I got my ass back quickly. She inquired about my mysteriously urgent destination, but I remained resolute in keeping it a secret. Until I knew August wasn't about to bust into my kitchen, I wanted Mila in the hands of someone with the strength to protect her. If I told Cal what Zakar wanted, she'd be on her way to help and that left two options for Mila: alone with an oblivious human mother like Luiza, or the young pup would be tagging along for the ride.

Luciano and I spent the night curled on a wooden bench inside a small airport. At sunrise we took a short flight deeper into the heart of Brazil, then caught a last-minute bus to take us out to a hotel located in the ecotourist destination of Bonito. This time of year the trees thinned their leaves under a hot sun and high humidity. By the time we'd arrived, my hair was a dark, sweaty curtain and my dress hugged my damp curves. Luc seemed unperturbed by the temperature, quietly fanning me with his braided straw hat. Hardly a bead of sweat touched his own face.

The bus pulled in front of a well-maintained, two story hotel of cheery slabbed sandstone.  Passengers ahead of us picked up themselves and their belongs quickly, eager as I was to escape the trapped, heated air of a bus without a single working air-conditioner. 

"You know, we never did get that drink," I told Luc.  "But I thought of something else you can buy me."

"Oh?" He asked, settling his straw hat back on his head. 

I dropped my leg on his lap and stretched my sweaty toes into the aisle. "Shoes."

All I had in my bag were the heels for last night. My dress, let alone the red heels, were hardly expedition-worthy. Luc laughed, and after we'd gotten ourselves a small room with mosquito netting on the beds, we scoured the shops for a shoe store. When my feet were properly cushioned, Luc bartered with a local fisherman for a map of the area. By then the sun had cast a vibrant orange glow across the treetops, drawing in the sweet relief of night and shadow.

The fisherman filleted a large, silver-scaled fish beside a crackling bonfire. I didn't speak his language, but there was no need to. The hesitation in his eyes as he wiped scales off his hands said it all. The sun was setting. He looked over me in my red dress with my hair pulled back and sneakers on, and he just knew we were about to do something stupid.

But Luc spoke smooth and fast and clasped the man's shoulder and passed another bill into his calloused hands. 

The map was ours.

That was all we needed, said the devil on my shoulder. Zakar had already had an inkling of where to go, but the map confirmed it. Our destination wasn't the narrow chasms of the Abismo Anhumas, but a small, lesser known cave system that had existed, according to the cat, since the beginnings of prehistory. 

To the river! the cat sang, bouncing eagerly on cinnamon toes.

"That's him?" Luciano whispered, pointing to the long-limbed creature hustling towards the trailhead. At that moment I realized he could see Zakar.  "Awfully small," he continued. "Are you quite sure we cannot do something to kill it?"