Page 5 of Coyote

Metal clanged.

The boar staggered. The big man went down with it, one knee behind the skull, both hands locked around the head. It thrashed hard enough to drag him through the dirt. He held on, tightening his arms around its neck until the animal stopped moving under him.

The crowd cheered.

By then I was hard as a rock and already in love.

I'd watched men kill with their hands my whole life. I'd done it myself and slept fine. I had never seen anybody do it like that, all that force spent without hurry or anger. I wanted those hands on me. I wanted to know if he'd be that patient with me underneath them.

He stood over the boar with his chest heaving and his arm running red. Then he crouched and laid one hand against its side.

Gently.

Like an apology.

Not the killing. That. That's the one that got me.

I'd already called it. That soft, pointless thing just meant I wasn't going to be able to take it back.

Mine.

The want came up right behind it, filthy and in a hurry. I wanted to fuck him. I wanted to bite him. I wanted to get him somewhere quiet and find out how many other impossible things fit inside that body.

Nimue lifted her head from under my jaw and tasted the air.

"Yeah," I told her, scratching under her chin. "I saw him first. Don't start."

They didn't let him breathe. Two Javelinas came over the chain link with zip ties and a second length of chain. One unlocked the cuff from the ground bolt. The big man could have broken both of them before they got close enough to touch him.

Instead, he held out his wrists, almost courteously.

My mouth went dry.

The boar, I understood. A man who fought like that had not run out of fight. He was choosing not to spend one coin of it on himself, and that did something worse to me than the killing had.

I wanted to be the one holding the other end of that chain. I wanted him on his knees, looking up at me with that same patience while I took my time deciding what to do with him.

I'd work that out later once I had him somewhere with a door I could close.

So I waited.

The crowd thinned toward the coolers. Money changed hands. Zaroff stood on a wooden crate counting his take while the big man disappeared into a livestock pen across the lot.

They parked one genius on a folding chair outside the pen with a shotgun across his knees. He lasted twelve minutes before the beer caught up with him. He looked toward the trailers, found nobody watching, and propped the shotgun against the chair before walking into the scrub.

I slid off the ledge and followed.

He stopped twenty feet in, facing away from the lot, and opened his jeans. The sound of piss hitting dry ground covered my first few steps. The crowd covered the rest.

I came up behind him and clamped one hand over his mouth. His whole body locked. Before he could decide whether to fight or scream, I drove my knife in under his ear and pulled it forward.

He jerked once against me. Hot piss splashed against my boot. Then his knees gave.

I lowered him into the scrub instead of letting him fall, careful not to snap any branches. More consideration than he deserved, but I was in a good mood. Everybody catches the spillover when I get like that.

I went through his pockets and found the cage keys. "Gracias, amigo."

The nearest trailer wasn't locked. Nobody robbed the Javelinas except for, apparently, me.