Page 23 of Preacher

The dog—wolf, because that was not a dog, no matter how hard I wanted it to be—was the size of a damn pony. Black fur tipped in silver, broad chest heaving, one shoulder slick with blood that matted the fur into dark spikes. Its head was lowered, ears pinned flat, body stretched out across the hardwood like it was trying to look smaller than it was.

It wasn’t working. You couldn’t shrink something that big by lying down. You just got a really big animal closer to the floor.

I pulled Preacher’s jacket tighter around my shoulders. The leather smelled like him, like smoke and engine grease and that clean undertone I was becoming very fond of, and I clung to that scent like it was a rope thrown to a drowning man.

“Crowbar.” My voice came out too high. “Where’s Preacher?”

Crowbar’s eyes flicked to the wolf then back to me. His toothpick was gone. That was the part that scared me the most. The man had not been without that toothpick once since I’d met him, and now it was nowhere to be seen, like he’d swallowed it in the chaos and hadn’t bothered to fish out another.

“He’s right here, Trent.”

“No, he’s not.” I swept my hand around the room, pointing at empty spaces where Preacher very obviously was not. “He ran with you guys, and now you’re all back, and he’s not here, and there’s a wolf in the living room, and—”

I stopped. My mouth kept moving for a second without sound, like the gears were stripped.

The wolf made a small noise. Not a growl. More like a chuff, soft, almost apologetic, and the amber eyes that lifted to mine were not the eyes of any animal I’d ever seen on Animal Planet.

They were the color of frozen whiskey.

My butt slid off the couch and onto the floor in a controlled collapse, the leather jacket pooling around my hips. The hardwood was cold through my jeans, but I barely felt it.

“No.” The word came out flat. “No, no, no. Absolutely not. I’m not doing this. I’m tapping out.”

“Trent.” Crowbar’s voice was the one you’d use on a kid standing too close to the edge of a roof.

“Don’t Trent me.” I pointed at the wolf without looking at it, because looking at it was the problem. “That is a fucking wolf. That is a wolf, Crowbar, in your clubhouse, bleeding on the floor, and you all walked in here without clothes, and nobody is screaming, which means either I hit my head harder than I thought when I got punched or—”

Or what? The wolf was really Preacher?

I made myself look at the animal again. It looked back but hadn’t moved a muscle since I’d slid off the couch. It was holding so still I could count the rise and fall of its ribs, and I could see the shudder that went through its flank when it breathed in too deep.

The cut on its shoulder. Right where Preacher’s tattoos crawled down his arm. The careful way it was holding its head low, eyes on me, like it was waiting to see whether I’d bolt.

I was sitting on the floor of a clubhouse full of bare-assed bikers, and not a single one of them was looking at the wolf like it didn’t belong here.

Maybe I was the one who didn’t belong here. Was this even real? Was I real?

“Crowbar.” My voice had gone very small. “I asked you a question in the truck.”

He crouched down a few feet from me, forearms on his knees, careful to keep his hands visible. “You did.”

“I asked if you guys were actual mechanics.”

“I remember.”

“That’s not the question I should’ve asked, is it?”

His smile was soft. Crowbar didn’t do soft smiles. Evil, smirking, mischievous, but not soft. “No, princess. Probably not.”

“Don’t call me that,” I said on autopilot, my eyes back on the wolf.

It hadn’t moved. The blood on its shoulder was thickening, going tacky in the fur, and I watched a single drop slide down its leg and land on the hardwood. Plop.

Somebody, somewhere, was going to have to mop that up, hopefully doing a better job than Mike.

The thought was so stupid and horrifyingly domestic that I felt the laugh climb up my throat and I couldn’t hold it in. It came out shaky and half-broken, and once it started, I couldn’t get it to stop. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth. The bruise on my jaw twinged. I laughed harder.

“Oh god.” I dragged in a breath that didn’t go all the way down. “Oh god, oh god. You are staring at Preacher.”