Love, Lies & Red Eyes | ONC 2023 (Complete)

Chapter Four | Lidia

Arturo Banderas is not human.

Somewhere deep down I knew this. But somehow, watching it happen still has my head spinning.

He turned into a dog. And how I'm sitting in the front seat of a truck while he drives. I'm being driven home by a cadejo. A walking, breathing, talking cadejo.

Once he tells me what he knows, I'll have more than enough information for my research questions for the rest of my life. They'll definitely have to give me tenure.

Arturo's fingers tap against the wheel. "You're very quiet." He eases off the gas and turns the corner onto my street.

"I guess I have been." The neighbour's cat is chasing the dog walker again. The world whizzes by as we turn the corner. "I'm thinking."

"Scared yet?" he asks again, eyes firmly on the road in front of us.

"I told you, I'm not scared. Should I be?" I risk a glance across the front seat, but his eyes remain trained on the road.

"I already told you, no," he grits out. "I'm not here to harm you. My whole life is about protecting the humans. Why would I harm you?"

The way he says it makes it sound like he doesn't consider me a human or something. Like he considers me one of his own kind. "It's just going to take me some time to think about it. Really wrap my head around... all of that."

My phone rings, vibrating in my hand.

"Who's that?" Arturo asks.

'Detective Morales' flashes on the screen, scrolling to the end of the name and then bouncing back to the beginning.

"It's the police," I admit, forgetting how that will sound to a... man? A creature who's just committed a... um, an animal slaughter?

"Why are you being called by the police?"

He's still not looking at me and his hands are relaxed on the wheel, but his voice is tense.

I think my head is still scrambled from the encounter with the... whatever that was, because I can't parse what I should tell him from what I shouldn't. "There was an incident the other night. They suspected a cadejo attack but the accounts don't line up with what we usually see. The police invited me there under false pretenses and have asked me to investigate, so we can figure out what really happened. I think they suspect murder, but I—"

"I know what happened," he says. "And it was a cadejo attack, after all."

I must be hearing things. Because there's no way he just said it was a cadejo attack.

"If you know what happened, how can you think it was a cadejo attack? It's presenting completely differently from—"

"It's not going to look like all the others because those supposed cadejo attacks weren't done by cadejos," he says, pulling the vehicle into the parking spot and turning it off.

"The cadejo attacks weren't perpetrated by cadejos?" I ask, certain I must have misunderstood.

"That is correct. Those murders you blamed on us were never us."

"Then who was it? Or... what was it?"

He pauses, pulling me into him with the sheer force of his stare. "It was... I don't think you have a name for them. We call them olebras."

"Olebras?" I roll the word around on my tongue. Bear snake.

"The creature that attacked you in the forest tonight," he says, eyes focusing on the light beige fabric on the interior of the roof.