Black Dog by Caitlin Kittredge Page A

invisibility I experienced going full force.
    That, and everyone I could see was fucked-­up beyond recognition, on their way to passing out if they hadn’t made it already. I watched two burly guys, shirtless except for their club vests, roll a smaller guy’s body off the pool table so one of them could rack up. By dawn, this place would look like Jonestown.
    Moving away from the wall, I skirted the pool table, the bar that was really just a bunch of nailed-­together crates and tubs full of ice and beer that went beyond cheap and verged on “glorified piss.” Things crunched underfoot, bottle caps and peanut shells. More than once I felt the brittle crack of a disposable syringe. I breathed in the mixture of stale hops, sweat, and skunky pot that rolled over me like a gentle, pungent ocean current.
    There was something else too, something tangy and sharp, like animal urine. Hot unwashed fur under a desert sun. The scent of something wild, something that wasn’t content to stay within four walls, swilling beer until it passed out.
    â€œHey, baby.” A hand swiped at my ass. I looked into the bleary eyes of a blond man who’d been all-right looking until somebody took a shovel to his nose. “Who’d you ride in with?” he said. The hand tightened its grip. I waited. I’d been around these types of places, with this type of man, way too long to lash out every time somebody helped himself to a handful of flesh.
    â€œ ’Cause if you ain’t riding with no one,” the guy slurred, “you’re gonna be riding with everyone. ’Less you and I go somewhere.”
    His accent was rounded and melodic, straight out of some shitty backwoods in the Alabama swamp. I considered asking him what his mama would think of this behavior, but just shrugged.
    â€œThere you go, baby,” he said, grinning wide. His teeth were crooked, so many gaps his mouth looked like a hill of tombstones. “You don’t need to be pulling no train, not with that face,” he said. “You want a drink?” He brandished a fifth of no-­name whiskey at me, and I grabbed it, cracking the brittle glass on the edge of one of the beer tubs and driving the jagged neck between his second and third knuckles, straight into the wall.
    â€œThanks,” I said, and kept moving. He screamed, but he was so trashed and the music was so loud, nobody even looked in our direction.
    I kept moving, scanning each face for either a shock of recognition or a guilty flinch. Being so close to so many shifters got my skin prickling and sweat working down my spine. Fortunately, these mutts couldn’t do much beyond stare at me as I passed a sagging sofa holding a tangle of tits, bad Brazilians, and one hairy biker ass, all undulating in unison. Usually shifter packs were better organized, or less high, but they clearly felt safe here. They were the top of this particular food chain, and they knew it.
    The clubhouse had been cut in half, a crude blockade of unfinished drywall covered in graffiti blocking my way. A girl in a leopard print top leaned against it, smoking a cigarette like it had done something to piss her off. She was smaller than I was, bad dye job radioactive under the barely there light. Fresh bruises tattooed what I could see of her rib cage, and her forearms had more lanes than the interstate.
    She was the only one in the whole place who made eye contact with me. I stopped, waiting to see what she’d do.
    After a long, vicious drag, she stomped the cigarette under her steel-­toed boot and slipped through a pair of saloon doors marked with one of those naked girl cutouts. Someone had helpfully scrawled SLUTS across the cutout’s ass, just in case I was confused about where to pee.
    In the bathroom, the girl was sitting on the sink. Once upon a time, the place had had stalls, with doors, but they were long gone. Dim purple bulbs flickered in the single fixture above our