Chapter 4

BEN WENT back to work, too, which meant making the business trip to Wyoming. The house was very big and quiet without him around.

This was purely psychological. I’d spent plenty of time in the house alone, when he was out working or whatever. Then, I didn’t think about it, because I knew he’d be back soon, or he’d call to let me know where he was. He’d still be in Denver, in our territory. I could listen for the sounds of him returning home.

Now, I listened for sounds that weren’t there. The walls seemed to creak, and every car engine or barking dog set my hair on end. I waited for the hum of his car turning into the driveway, a sound I knew I wasn’t going to hear. Maddening.

I kept music on to fill the space.

At night, lying in bed alone, the quiet grew much worse. I left the music on, turned low, to provide a background noise to distract the part of my mind that kept listening for cars, or kept convincing me that an intruder was in the kitchen making off with the silverware. I slept on Ben’s side of the bed, my face buried in his pillow, so I could breathe in the scent of him. I berated myself for being soppy.

The next afternoon, I sat on the floor of the office, much as Ben had found me the day before, papers and books piled everywhere, thinking. Pretending to think. I was leaning against the desk, looking at the sky through the window, enjoying the winter sun blazing through, and if someone had asked what I was thinking about in that moment, I wouldn’t have been able to say.

While thinking I would work more when I had the house to myself was a nice idea, I’d known all along that it wasn’t going to happen, because not having enough time, space, or quiet to work wasn’t the reason I hadn’t finished the book. I had the problem of too much information, and no clue how to tie it together. I had entire chapters written, and no idea what order to put them in. Did I arrange stories chronologically, geographically, thematically? Biographically, with a framework about how the stories related to me personally? All equally valid approaches. I kept changing my mind.

When my cell phone rang, I jumped like it was a fire alarm, scattering papers and sliding shut the book I’d been pretending to read. I needed a minute of scrambling before I could actually reach the phone, and was surprised when the caller ID showed it wasn’t Ben. I shouldn’t have been surprised; he’d called last night to say he’d arrived in Cheyenne okay, and I wasn’t expecting another call from him until tonight.

This call came from Tom, one of the werewolves in our pack. I may have sounded a little surly when I answered.

“What is it?”

“Um, hi?” Tom was one of the bigger males in the pack—one of the tough guys, the kind who actually made you think of werewolves when you saw him. That he could sound sheepish talking to me usually made me smile.

I settled down. “Hi. And how are we today?”

“Actually … we may have a problem.”

I straightened, a shadow of fur prickling on my skin and hackles rising. “What is it?”

“I’m up in the mountains, out past Georgetown, and I caught a weird scent. Might be werewolf or some other kind of lycanthrope. Definitely not one of ours.”

A stranger, in our territory. We’d had invaders before. Just recently a strange werewolf had arrived for the express purpose of trying to take the pack away from us. I took this sort of thing seriously. With the news about Roman and Antony, my worry pressed on me like a boulder.

“Is it just one person or a group? Did they seem lost? Are they looking for something?”

Tom said, “It wasn’t enough to make a trail, not anything I could track. It was almost like they circled around for a while. Maybe they were looking for something.”

“And it was fresh?”

“Couldn’t be more than a day old,” he said. “It was pretty strong—I wouldn’t have called if it was just a trace.”

I blew out a breath. This could be nothing—someone passing through, getting lost. Or it could be someone with bad intentions. A scouting mission for an attack at some later date?

Either way, I couldn’t ignore it. If things went well, we might have a new friend to talk to. If not … I had a territory to defend. I started cleaning up in preparation for leaving. I wanted to go there to take a look.

“Just out of curiosity,” I said. “What were you doing out that way?”

He paused a moment, then said, nervous, “Um … just going for a hike…”

“You shifted, didn’t you? Went out for a run?” “Going for a run” was a euphemism among werewolves. Tom grumbled a perfunctory, unenthusiastic denial. “Why exactly did you do this? Full moon’s not for a week.” Six days, actually. I kept count. We all did.

“I’m not hurting anything,” he said, and I could almost see him pouting. “I didn’t get in any kind of trouble.”

We had to shape-shift on the night of a full moon, but we had the ability to shift anytime we wanted. Or we shifted when we were stressed, angry, frightened, in danger … yeah. Part of why we formed packs was so we could watch out for each other. We could gather on nights of the full moon, shape-shift together, make sure we stayed safe—and didn’t do anything that might get us in trouble, like hunting people. We could take care of each other, so we didn’t shift uncontrollably at other times. Solo shifting kind of defeated the purpose.

“Tom. You know better than that.”

“Seriously, I’m not hurting anything. I can handle it.”

If I sounded like an irate parent, he sounded like a teenager. I trusted Tom; he was smart enough to go to a remote spot if he was going to do recreational shape-shifting. Of everyone in the pack, he was probably the one who most enjoyed being a werewolf—who reveled in the power and exhilaration of running on four legs, feeling the wind in your fur, hunting for the taste of fresh meat …

Most of us tried to ignore how good being wolf made us feel.

“Why don’t you just tell me that you had a suspicion something was wrong and went out to patrol under your own initiative?”

“Okay, then. I went out to patrol because I thought something might be wrong.”

“Fine. Okay. Good work, then. I want to check it out. I can be out there in about an hour. Can you wait for me and show me what you found?”

“I’ll be here.”

We hung up and I looked around at my paper-strewn, chaotic office. This could wait another day. Going to see what Tom had found was more important.

* * *

I CALLED Ben. His phone went straight to voice mail, which I expected. He was probably in a meeting. I left a message explaining what was happening and that Tom was with me, because Ben would worry if I was on my own. He’d worry anyway, but he’d be reassured that I wasn’t running off alone. Then I drove into the mountains to meet Tom.

Denver lay near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains—the Front Range, which rose from the Great Plains like a wall of sandstone and granite. I turned the car onto I-70. The freeway climbed, curving around hills, until I was in the mountains proper. Within half an hour, pine-covered slopes surrounded me. In the dead of winter, I rolled down the window so I could smell the sharp, icy air, laden with the scent of snow and forest. The wind whipped strands of my blond hair out of my ponytail and into my face. South-facing slopes and hillsides were bare of snow, green with conifers rising tall. North-facing slopes had a carpet of white. I’d managed to miss ski traffic heading to the resorts farther west.

Soon enough, I reached the Georgetown exit and pulled off onto the frontage road, and from there to the road that wound into the mountains. Then came a couple of narrow drives, then dirt roads. I felt like I was traveling through time, from the height of civilization to some nineteenth-century village, to wilderness. I ran into patches of ice and snow, but my little car with its snow tires handled the road okay.

On full-moon nights, we rotated between half a dozen semiremote spots in national forest land in the Rockies, or out east on the plains. They had to be close enough to Denver that we could drive there in an hour or two, but far enough away from people that we weren’t likely to draw attention or cause trouble. A set of USGS topographic maps marking service roads helped us pick our spots. The best ones had sheltered areas where we could bed down for the rest of the night, open spaces where we could run, and plenty of prey. Deer and rabbit, usually. That was the true purpose of shape-shifting and running on full-moon nights: blood. The need to let our wolf sides loose; the desire to kill that we could only restrain for so long. This one night, we had to send our howling songs to the moon, and let our claws and teeth tear into the weak.

I found Tom’s car, a compact SUV parked on the side of the road by a pine tree. I pulled my hatchback in behind his car, then followed his scent through the trees, around a rise, and into a clearing. Tom stood on a slope patched with half-melted drifts of snow, leaning on a tree and looking out into the next valley. He wore jeans and no shirt, and went shoeless. He must have called me as soon as he’d woken up after his time as a wolf and dressed just enough to appear decent. In his thirties, he was as fit and rugged a man as a red-blooded girl like me could hope to gaze upon.

“Hey,” I said, coming to stand beside him. I touched his shoulder, a confirmation of contact, a wolfish gesture of comfort and identity. Relaxing, he dropped his shoulders and pressed his lips into a smile. He turned his gaze away, a sign of submission to the alpha of his pack.

“Do you smell it?” he asked.

Stepping away from him, I tipped my face up, found a faint, vagrant breeze, and turned my nose into it. The smells here were thick, layer upon layer of vivid life and wild. I had to filter them out, ignoring the omnipresent smell of trees, forest decay and detritus; the myriad trails of deer and skunk and fox and squirrel and grouse and sparrow, no matter how they piqued my appetite; and more distant scents of mountain snow, an icebound creek.

And there it was, acrid and alien, standing out because it so obviously didn’t belong. Wolf and human, bound together, fur under the skin—and something else. There were two distinct scents. I recognized the second one, but I understood why Tom hadn’t. This scent also gave me the tangled mix of fur and skin that indicated lycanthrope, but with a feline edge to it, both tangy and musky, making me think of golden eyes and a smug demeanor. This one was female. The wolf was male.

“That other one’s a were-lion,” I said. “They’ve been through here, but they didn’t stick around.”

“Were-lion,” Tom said, furrowing a brow. “Really? And they’re together?”

“Dogs and cats—sign of the apocalypse. They didn’t mark or anything, did they? Just walked on through, like they’re scouting without being threatening. You think?”

“No clue,” he said. “But it’s making me nervous.”

“That’ll teach you to go off Changing and running by yourself.”

“Give me a break,” he muttered, but his body language was all apology: shoulders slouched, making him look small and sheepish. If he’d had a tail it would have been tucked between his legs.

That was all I wanted, a little chagrin, a little embarrassment. I might have been the alpha around here but I wasn’t much into physical domination. Tom was a lot bigger than I was—he’d beat me in a straight fight. I had to be the leader of this gang without fighting. People usually knew when they’d done something wrong; they didn’t need me pointing it out. But I could make them feel guilty. I could rub it in a little.

Now that I’d picked it out, the smell became intrusive, and the muscles across my shoulders tensed. “If they were friendly, they’d come out and show themselves, right?”

“They’re probably looking for you,” he said. “To meet the famous werewolf queen.”

I rolled my eyes. “So if I stand here long enough they’ll walk on up and introduce themselves? No. I want to find out what’s going on here.”

I set off, following the trail the intruders had made. Tom fell into step behind me.

This was one of those bright winter days in Colorado, when the temperature rose enough to thaw out the air and melt some of the snow. I grew warm as we walked, almost needing to take off my sweater, but my breath still fogged. Being outdoors on days like today was a pleasure.

The trail didn’t follow a straight line. The two species I’d sensed, wolf and lion, walked together, circling back as if they were searching for something. The backtracking led us south and west. I paused often, thinking I could hear them ahead of us if I listened hard enough.

We continued for over an hour, and the shadows grew longer. I didn’t want to be out here after dark, but I wanted the mystery solved. These lycanthropes had to come from somewhere, and had to be going somewhere.

Tom had a worried, furrowed look on his face. He’d ranged off a dozen paces or so—following a different branch of the same trail.

“Find anything?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t like it.”

The strangers hadn’t been hunting, hadn’t been marking territory—they really did seem to want to get the pack’s attention rather than challenge us. But if that was the case, why not show themselves?

We went on from where we had originally picked up the trail, and Tom’s path took him even farther away.

“Hey, Tom, you still tracking both of them?” We were moving to opposite sides of the same slope; in a few more paces, he’d be out of sight.

“Yeah,” he said.

So was I. “Let’s back up some.”

Sure enough, the trail split. They might have taken one path in and another path out. As if they’d arrived, circled around enough to confuse the hell out of us, then left again by another route.

“You think the trails meet up on the other side of the hill?” Tom asked.

“I don’t know what’s going on. Might as well check it out.”

We went back to following the two trails, Tom taking one side and me the other.

Being in the mountains, you couldn’t actually see the mountains, unless you got to a peak or open valley where the vistas become visible, big sky and horizon surrounded by hills and snowy peaks. In the mountain forests, the land was a series of slopes, clearings, meadows, creek-cut gullies and washes, and steep rockfalls. Often, you couldn’t see more than fifty feet in front of or behind you. The slope Tom and I circled was a rocky bulge on the side of a gentler hill that probably dropped off to a valley or ravine on the other side. I was climbing steadily uphill; he’d gotten farther downhill. We might not meet up exactly on the other side of the slope, but I expected to be able to see him once I cleared the pine trees and outcrops of this particular formation.

He’d only been out of sight for half a minute. I could still hear him, soft breathing, quiet steady footsteps on hard ground. His scent was clear on the air.

Something hit me. Fast and small, like a Ping-Pong ball ramming into my side from behind, accompanied by a sting. Hissing, I jumped a step and reached around to slap at myself—my hand touched something hard and plastic hanging from my side, under my rib cage. I yanked it out, stared.

A dart, with a needle long enough to punch clear through my sweater and into my skin. The plastic syringe attached to it was as long as my hand. Enough stuff had been in there to knock out a bear, probably.

My heart raced, exactly what I didn’t want it to do. When I tried to call out to Tom, to warn him, my throat closed up. The sound was a choke instead of the intended howl. I tried to run.

Tranquilizer darts worked on werewolves, as long as they held enough of the drug. I’d seen it. I was guessing whoever had fired this one knew what they were doing, because the dart’s impact point started tingling, and numbness spread through my body. My breath caught—the air seemed to have turned thick, and my vision wavered, like I was looking through a fogged window. When I took a step, my legs trembled, and I couldn’t raise my arms to break my fall. Again, I tried to shout to Tom, to let out a howl. My voice squeaked like a mouse’s.

I fell facedown on a snowbank, trying to get my limbs to move, trying to fill my lungs with enough air to call a warning, and failing. The edges of the world took on a red tinge, then collapsed to darkness.

My last thought: my day was about to get truly awful.

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