Definitely Dead

didn’t present a threat to them, at least in their minds.
    They were probably right. I couldn’t think of anything to do to prevent them from taking us wherever we were going. I didn’t have a weapon, and though I worried at the duct tape binding my hands, my teeth didn’t seem to be strong enough to make a weak spot. I rested for a minute, shutting my eyes wearily. The last blow had opened a cut on my cheek. A big tongue rasped over my bleeding face. Then again.
    “Don’t cry,” said a strange, guttural voice, and I opened my eyes to check that it was, indeed, coming from Quinn.
    Quinn had so much power that he could stop the change once it had begun. I suspected he could trigger it, too, though I’d noticed that fighting could bring it on in any shape-shifter. He’d had the claws during the fight in Hadley’s apartment, and they’d almost tipped the balance in our favor. Since he’d gotten so enraged at Clete during the episode by the side of the road, Quinn’s nose had flattened and broadened. I had a close-up view of the teeth in his mouth, teeth that had altered into tiny daggers.
    “Why didn’t you change fully?” I asked, in a tiny whisper.
    Because there wouldn’t be enough room for you in this space, babe. After I change, I’m seven feet long and I weigh about four hundred fifty pounds.
    That will make any girl gulp. I could only be grateful he’d thought that far ahead. I looked at him some more.
    Not grossed out?
    Clete and the driver were exchanging recriminations about the phone incident. “Why, grandpa, what big teeth you have,” I whispered. The upper and lower canines were so long and sharp they were really scary. (I called them canines; to cats, that might be an insult.)
    Sharp . . . they were sharp. I worked my hands up close to his mouth, and begged him with my eyes to understand. As much as I could tell from his altered face, Quinn was worried. Just as our situation aroused his defensive instincts, the idea I was trying to sell to him excited other instincts. I will make your hands bleed, he warned me, with a great effort. He was partially animal now, and the animal thought processes didn’t necessarily travel the same paths as the human.
    I bit my own bottom lip to keep from gasping as Quinn’s teeth bit into the duct tape. He had to exert a lot of pressure to get the three-inch canines to pierce the duct tape, and that meant that those shorter, sharp incisors bit into my skin, too, no matter how much care he took. Tears began rolling down my face in an unending stream, and I felt him falter. I shook my bound hands to urge him on, and reluctantly he bent back to his task.
    “Hey, George, he’s biting her,” Clete said from the passenger’s seat. “I can see his jaw moving.”
    But we were so close together and the light was so poor that he couldn’t see that Quinn was biting the binding on my hands. That was good. I was trying hard to find good things to cling to, because this was looking like a bleak, bleak world just at this moment, lying in the van traveling through the rain on an unknown road somewhere in southern Louisiana.
    I was angry and bleeding and sore and lying on my already injured left arm. What I wanted, what would be ideal, would be to find myself clean and bandaged in a nice bed with white sheets. Okay, clean and bandaged and in a clean nightgown. And then Quinn would be in the bed, completely in his human form, and he would be clean and bandaged, too. And he’d have had some rest, and he’d be wearing nothing at all. But the pain of my cut and bleeding arms was becoming too demanding to ignore any longer, and I couldn’t concentrate enough to cling to my lovely daydream. Just when I was on the verge of whimpering—or maybe just out-and-out screaming—I felt my wrists separate.
    For a few seconds I just lay there and panted, trying to control my reaction to the pain. Unfortunately Quinn couldn’t gnaw on the binding on his own hands, since they’d been bound behind him. He finally succeeded in turning over so I could see his wrists.
    George said, “What are they doing?”
    Clete glanced back at us, but I had my hands together. Since the day was dark, he couldn’t see very clearly. “They’re not doing anything. He quit biting her,” Clete said, sounding disappointed.
    Quinn succeeded in getting a claw hooked into the silvery duct tape. His claws were not sharp-edged along their curve like a scimitar; their power lay in the piercing point