Free Otherworld Nights by Kelley Armstrong

against the wall. Footsteps sounded. A man yelled at Cain, mistaking him for a drunk. The mutt mumbled something about being jumped, struggling to talk with a broken jaw.
    I gritted my teeth. Ending a fight by alerting humans was bad enough. Trying to set them on my trail? That toppled into full-blown cowardice.
    I shook it off and retreated before someone came looking for Cain’s “mugger.”
    Back in the restaurant, I longed to visit the washroom and scrub Cain’s stink off me. But I’d been gone too long already. So I grabbed a linen napkin from a wait station, dunked it into a glass of water, and carefully cleaned the blood from my hands as I strode through the dining room, then tossed the cloth onto an uncleared table.
    Elena looked up from the last bites of her meal as I approached.
    “Hey there,” she said. “Thought you’d made a fast-food run on me.”
    “Nah.” I took my suit coat from the chair and slipped it on, blocking the mutt’s smell and covering the blood splatter. “Something didn’t agree with me.”
    “Lunch, I bet. That’s the thing about buffets—lots of food, none of it very good. So, is dessert out of the question?”
    I shook my head. “Just give me a second to finish dinner.”
    Our hotel was a few blocks from the restaurant, so we’d walked. Heading back, I had to switch sides every time we turned a corner, staying downwind from Elena and keeping a foot’s gap between us.
    That worked only until we got to our room. She leaned against me as she pulled off her heels, then ran her hand up the back of my leg, grinning upside-down, her hair fanning the floor. She swept it back as she stood, her hand sliding up my leg and into my back pocket.
    “Pizza now?” she asked. “Or after we work up an appetite?”
    I tugged her hand out, lacing my fingers with hers, elbow locked to keep her from getting close enough to smell Cain.
    “Hold that thought,” I said. “I’m going to grab a shower.”
    Her brows shot up. “Now?”
    “That problem in the restaurant? I’m thinking it might be something I rolled in this afternoon. My leg’s itching like mad. Let me scrub it off before I pass it along.”
    Her head tilted, the freckles across her nose bunching as she studied me, her bullshit meter wavering. Normal-Elena would have called me on it, but honeymoon-Elena wanted to avoid confrontation, so after a moment she shrugged.
    “Take your time. I’ll catch the news.”
    I ran my hands through my hair and lifted my face into the spray. My forearm throbbed as the hot water hit it. Tomorrow I’d pay for overworking the damaged muscle, but it was worth it if Caintook home proof that Clayton Danvers’s arm was definitely
not
“fucked up.”
    For two years, I’d been careful in every fight, convinced no one would notice I was favoring my left. I should have known better. Like scavengers, mutts could sense weakness.
    I squeezed the water from my hair as I moved out of the spray and looked down at the pitted rut of scar tissue. All these years of fighting without a permanent injury, and what finally does it? One little scratch from a rotting zombie. At the worst of the infection, I’d been in danger of losing my arm, so I couldn’t complain about some muscle damage.
    But if rumors were circulating, I had a problem. Was Theo Cain’s son only the first in a new generation of mutts who’d heard the stories about me and fluffed them off as urban legends or, at least, ancient history?
    I’d first cemented my reputation to protect Jeremy. Now I had fresh concerns—a mate, kids … and a fucked-up arm that was never going to get any better. So how was I going to convince a new generation of mutts that Clayton Danvers really was the raging psychopath their fathers warned them about?
    I rubbed the facecloth over my chest, hard and brisk enough to burn. I didn’t want to go through that shit again. What the hell would I do for an encore? What
could
I do that wouldn’t have Elena bustling the