Page 64 of Satisfied By the Slime
“There’s something on the ridge,” he says quietly.
I tense under his palms. “The thing that killed the coyote?”
“I don’t know.” His thumbs work deeper, and I force myself to unclench. “It feels old. Watchful. Not hostile, but not calm either.”
“You can sense it?”
Oz is quiet for a long moment. His hands still on my shoulders, and I can feel him thinking, reaching for some half-formed memory.
“Yes. It’s strangely familiar,” he says finally. “Like something I knew a long time ago and forgot.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“I don’t know.”
I stare at the ridge. The safety committee will investigate. They’ll find tracks, or traces, or Oz himself if he keeps going outside at night. They’ll connect the wrong dots and come for him with pitchforks and torchesand whatever else passes for mob justice in Coyote Springs.
“We need to find out what it is,” I say. “Before they do.”
Oz’s hands resume their slow work on my shoulders. “You want to go out there?”
“Tonight.”
I stand up and head inside for the kitchen table, pulling a flashlight from the junk drawer. Oz follows and flows through the doorway. I spread out the county map I keep under the phone charger and trace the route with my finger. Up the wash, past the old mining claim, along the ridge trail to the area where Gary found the coyote.
If there’s something out there, I’m going to find it first. And then I’m going to prove it isn’t Oz.
Chapter 16
Rope Through Water
Maisie
The wash is ankle-deep insand that swallows my footsteps. I keep the flashlight pointed low, the beam tracking over scattered rock and creosote, and try to ignore the way the darkness presses in beyond its reach.
Oz flows beside me in his preferred shape, tall and looselyhumanoid, and he catches the faint moonlight to throw it back in shifting iridescence. He makes almost no sound. When he steps, the sand barely registers his weight.
He hasn’t said anything for the entire trek.
I stop and turn to look at him. His face is a smooth expanse of teal, but there’s a pulse of gold at his center. Concern. Or curiosity. I still haven’t learned all of his colors.
“You okay?” I ask. “Do you still sense it?”
Oz tilts his head. The gesture is so human that I sometimes forget he learned it from observation, not instinct. “Yes. Just barely. A creature yearning.”
Yearning for what, I’m afraid to ask.
An owl calls from somewhere up the canyon, a low question repeated twice. The night answers with silence. Somewhere to our left, something small skitters between rocks. Lizard, probably. Maybe a kangaroo rat.
I let Oz hold my hand.
We keep moving. The wash narrows as we climb, the walls rising on either side in layersof red sandstone and pale limestone. Oz’s surface shifts as we pass through shadows and open stretches, violet deepening to indigo in the darkest pockets, teal brightening where the moon reaches. He’s reading something in the rocks. Some mineral signature I can’t perceive.
“Here,” he says suddenly.
I stop and sweep the flashlight at the wash ahead, finding nothing but sand and stone and a twisted mesquite clinging to the wall.
“What do you see?”
