Page 83 of Coyote

I reached up to shift Nimue. I'd draped her over my collarbone when I started because she'd been sluggish and cold to the touch, and I'd figured she needed the heat of my neck. I’d been thinking too hard about Miguel to look any closer.

The second my fingers brushed her scales, she snapped.

She missed my jaw by a foot, closing on empty air next to my ear, then pulled back, coiling tight, her tongue whipping. She was hanging onto my throat with the rest of her body, drawn up tense, trying to work out where the threat had gone.

I froze, hands flat on the crate, breathing shallow. "Easy," I said. "It's me."

She struck at the sound of my voice and missed again.

Her eyes were blue, milky, and clouded. Blind.

She stayed coiled there for a second, her head weaving, tasting the air. Then she finally slid back down my shoulder, tucking her head under my jaw.

Nine years. I'd dug her out of a frozen culvert with a broken tail and hauled her through every bad night of my life, and she'd never once snapped at me. My hands were shaking against the wood of the crate.

"Good girl," I told her.

John started to push himself up from his bucket, one hand braced hard against his busted ribs.

"Don't. She'll go for you, too."

"She's blind, not rabid." He didn't listen. He crouched as low as his side would let him and just watched. "How long?"

"She quit eating on Tuesday. The eyes are new."

"You didn't say anything."

"I've been busy."

He didn't argue. He just stood up and went back to rearranging the shed. He'd been doing it all week. Moving the ammo boxes off the high shelf, dragging crates out into the yard, changing the lightbulbs. The room had shifted a foot to the left since breakfast.

"What are you even doing?" I asked.

"Counting." He pulled down a fresh box and set it on the bench. "You've got saline in a barn fridge, gauze spread across four different buildings, and the nearest doctor is an hour's drive away."

"So?"

"So I'm organizing."

With nothing else to fix, John had turned the shed into his personal mission.

"Bring her into the house," John said.

"No."

"Put her in Sierra's back room. It has a window. I can check her eyes twice a day, make sure she isn't getting an infection."

"You can't fix a shed."

"A what?"

"Shed." I lifted Nimue off my neck, careful to keep my fingers away from her mouth. She let me do it this time, her body cold and heavy as she slid over my knuckles. I lowered her into the crate. "That's what she's doing. The eyes go milky, they clear up, and then the whole skin comes off in one piece. She'll be fine in a few days."

"And until then, she's blind and trying to bite your face off."

"Exactly. She can't see, so anything that gets close is a threat."

John braced his hand on the workbench and lowered himself back onto his bucket with a groan. "So what does she need?"