The Copper Taste of the Well

The rusted radiator in my ninety-two Chevy was bleeding steam, and three miles of dry wash sat between me and a bloodbath. If I didn't find the source of the rot in the border well before sundown, Macario would load twenty men into flatbed trucks and paint the ranchland red. My Alpha didn't ask questions when he smelled blood. He just bought more ammunition.

I killed the ignition at the lip of the arroyo. The engine gave one last shudder and died with a metallic clatter that sounded like brass casings rattling in a metal pail. Heat pressed through the cracked windshield, heavy as a wool blanket soaked in grease. Outside, the midday sun had baked the caliche dirt to the color of bleached bone.

I popped the glove box, pulled out a warm can of generic lemon-lime soda, and took two flat gulps before setting it on the dashboard. Then I checked my sidearm. A battered nine-millimeter hung in the scarred leather holster at my hip. Against a werewolf, standard lead was mostly an insult, but the noise bought you three seconds of hesitation. In my line of work, three seconds was usually the difference between walking home and feeding the turkey vultures.

I stepped out into the furnace blast of the desert.

My work boots crunched against the gravel. The leather around the ankles was stiff with old rattler venom and dried grease from the truck stop wash-bays. I pulled my hat brim down to cut the white glare.

The scent hit me ten yards before I reached the edge of the gully.

It wasn't dead livestock. Rotting beef had a greasy, bloated stink that made the back of your throat itch. This was sharper, like battery acid spilled across hot sheet metal. My wolf paced behind my ribs, claws scraping against the inside of my lungs. She hated the smell. She hated the heat. Most of all, she hated being out here alone without the pack at our back.

Quiet, I told her. She grumbled, circling once in the dark corners of my skull before settling down.

The neutral well sat in the low trough of the arroyo where the highway territory collided with the ranch fences. For thirty years, neither pack owned it. For thirty years, both sides pumped from the same deep pocket of groundwater because the desert didn't care about pack boundaries. If you didn't share the water in this county, everyone died.

Until two nights ago, when four mechanics at the junction truck stop drank from the tap and started vomiting black bile.

I could still hear them groaning on the cots in the motel clinic behind the diner. Their skin had turned gray, their fever burning hot enough to fry an egg on their foreheads. Macario had stood over them with a cold bottle of beer in one hand and a machete in the other, watching them heave. The ranchers did this, he had told me, his thumb testing the blade's edge. They want to choke us off the highway. You bring me proof, Oco, or I take their south pasture by sunrise.

I slid down the loose scree of the embankment, boots skidding on loose shale until I hit the dry wash floor. The pump house was nothing more than four sheets of corrugated iron bolted to weathered cedar posts. One of the iron sheets hung crooked, flapping in the thermal wind with a rhythmic screech.

I knelt by the iron pipe casing.

The ground around the spigot was stained dark. Not wet, but coated in a sticky, iridescent film that shimmered green under the noon glare. I peeled off my leather glove and touched the crust at the edge of the puddle.

Cold. Chemically cold, despite the hundred-degree sun.

I lifted my fingers toward my face, breathing in just enough to parse the notes. My tongue went instantly numb. The copper taste of alkali hit first, followed by the oily reek of industrial solvent. Trichloroethylene. The kind of heavy degreaser they used to strip aircraft engines fifty miles north at the old municipal airfield.

No shifter in this valley ran an airfield. Neither Macario nor Yaretzi wasted good money on high-grade chemical drums when cheap diesel did the job.

I leaned closer to the caliche silt.

Wolf tracks were everywhere, broad and heavy, but they were two days old. That was our patrol, inspecting the damage after the mechanics collapsed. Beneath those older prints, pressed shallowly into the hard-packed dirt near the wellhead, ran a different set of prints.

Narrow pads. Elongated claws. Light, cautious steps.

Coyote.

A four-legged shift, but smaller than any wolf in the county. And right beside the paw print, wedged into a fissure between two dry stones, sat an amber shard of thick glass.

I pulled my hunting knife from its sheath and used the tip to pry the glass loose. It was the threaded neck of a commercial ampoule, stamped with a serial code in faded white ink.

"Look at that," I muttered to the empty air. "Somebody brought a shopping list."

This wasn't a drunken border skirmish over cattle or water rights. Someone had driven out here with laboratory-grade poison, dropped it down the well casing, and walked away on coyote paws.

If I brought this shard to Macario, would he care? Probably not. He wanted an excuse to take the ranch pastures anyway. But if I gave it to the council elders, it would buy us forty-eight hours of parley. It was leverage. A clean, undeniable piece of physical evidence.

The distinct metallic click of a rifle hammer cocking snapped through the silence.

"Don't move your hand from that dirt, highway dog."

The voice came from ten feet above my head, cool and dry as the brush around us.

I didn't reach for my pistol. Moving under a drawn barrel was a great way to catch a thirty-thirty slug through the spine. Instead, I stayed on one knee, fingers curled around the glass shard, and slowly raised my head.

Tlalli stood on the caliche ledge directly above the pump house.

She held a lever-action Winchester leveled at the center of my chest. She wore faded canvas pants tucked into dusty riding boots, a buckskin vest over a gray work shirt, and two dark braids tied back with rawhide. She was the younger sister of Alpha Yaretzi, which made her pack royalty on the grass side of the border. It also made her the sharpest tracker between here and the mountains.

"You're on the wrong side of the wash, Ocotlan," Tlalli said. Her dark eyes didn't blink. The black barrel of the rifle never wavered by an inch.

"The arroyo is neutral ground," I said, keeping my voice level. "You know the treaty as well as I do."

"The treaty ended when your boys poured poison down our drinking line."

"We didn't pour shit." I slowly stood up, keeping my palms open and visible. "Our people are the ones puking their guts out in the motel clinic. Why would we poison our own tap?"

"To blame us," she countered instantly. "To give Macario an excuse to drive his tankers across our south fence. He's been eyeing our spring fed holding tanks since July."

"Macario is a bastard, but he isn't stupid," I said. "He likes profit. Dead truck drivers don't buy diesel."

"Save the sales pitch for the undertaker." Tlalli adjusted her grip on the walnut stock. "Turn around. Hands behind your head. You're coming to the ranch house so my brother can decide whether to hang you or bleed you."

I weighed the distance between us. Ten feet up, eight feet out.

If she fired, the bullet would take a chunk out of my shoulder or punch through my ribs. Shifter healing would patch it in an hour, but an hour in Yaretzi's cellar meant a collar made of barbed wire and a bullet behind the ear. That wasn't an option.

"I found the vial, Tlalli," I said, holding up my left hand with the amber shard pinched between two fingers. "Look at the stamp. Industrial grade. Coyotes carried it in."

Her eyes flicked toward the glass for a fraction of a second.

That was all I needed.