Off the Beaten Path

by Cari Z

  The hot water heater for the Dormer’s house was huge, which I really appreciated. I’d been keeping my showers brief over the past few days, but I was used to taking a leisurely bath in the evenings after putting Ava to sleep. I wanted to take more time, and tonight I was going to.

  Apparently not a lot more time, though, because holy shit, it felt so good to touch myself I almost came the moment my hand wrapped around my dick. I knew the feel of my own hand, the way it felt when I stroked myself off, and it was different tonight. I still had Henry’s hand on my mind, his warmth, the breadth of his palm. God, how amazing would it feel if he was the one holding my cock in his hand? If I had the heat of his body pressed against mine, his long arm wrapping around my body—it would be so easy for him to reach around me. He was so much bigger than I was—to grip me and touch me, still so gently, so sweet? Would he like the way I felt? Would he jerk me off and grind against me, spread me out against the back of the tub and go down on his hands and knees and use his mouth on me—

  “Fuuhh-huuuck!” I tried to keep my voice down, but it was hard when I was busy having the best orgasm I could remember. And it wasn’t even my doing, not really.

  I let the evidence wash away down the drain, then stayed there and let the water beat against me until I was so boneless I felt like I might collapse. I managed to get out and dry myself off, went through the motions of brushing my teeth, and made it back to my bedroom without running into anyone. Nice.

  I barely remembered to set my alarm before I fell asleep.

  Chapter Twelve

  Henry

  IN THE end, it was a group of five of us that met the guardian at the gates: me, Ward, Roman, Sam, and Tennyson, who’d claimed he was getting stir-crazy sitting around in his clinic all day. He did smell a little agitated, but not for the reason he was claiming. I knew it was starting to wear on him that Ava hadn’t begun her shift yet. He’d been optimistic when Ward had first arrived, but the longer she went without any sign of a change, the harder he took it. Tennyson was the only member of La Garita who had come from a disbanded pack, and he was incredibly sensitive to any perceived threat, whether it came from without or within.

  I didn’t know all the details of what had happened to his last pack, but I knew he’d suffered for his role in it. He was still in pain, and if it relieved that pain in any way for him to join us on what at this point seemed like an overrated outing, then I was all for it.

  John met us at the gate with his daughter Genevieve behind the wheel of their Jeep Wrangler. I raised my eyebrows, and John had the decency to look a little abashed. For all the tirades I’d listened to him go on about safe driving practices and how our kids were all going to be menaces on the road….

  “She’s got to get her practice hours in somehow, now she’s got her license,” he grumbled as we shook hands. “The drop’s going to be a little ways out from the trailhead for San Luis Peak. It’s coming in by plane, so we’ll probably have to use the snowcat to fetch it out of the damn swamp.”

  “Not a problem.” I jerked a thumb back at the trailer I was towing. “I’ve got the mini loaded up. If we need more than that, then they just should have trucked the damn stuff in to begin with.”

  John snorted, but he seemed amused. “Eh, the feds aren’t having fun unless they’re wasting time and money playing cloak-and-dagger games with you special snowflakes.”

  “Dad.” Genna frowned at her father. “Don’t be rude.”

  John smiled at her in turn, his sour expression finally softening. “How’s Henry going to remember who he’s dealing with if I’m not at least occasionally a jackass, sweetheart?”

  His daughter sighed the sigh of the heavily put-upon. “You’re so weird.”

  “I know.” He glanced into my 4Runner. “Full crew.”

  “People get antsy in the winter. It’s good to provide a change of scenery every now and then.”

  “Yeah, right. Instead of these snowy trees, we’ll go look at those snowy trees.” He shook his head. “Whatever. As long as they can keep up. See you at the trailhead.”

  “See you there.” I pulled ahead, rolling the window up to preserve the heating in the car for Sam and Ward.

  “So.” Ward broke the silence after a moment. “Has he always been an asshole, or is that just because I’m around?”

  Roman laughed, then cut it off and pulled his jacket a little tighter around himself. Was he cold? He couldn’t be. I could barely smell him beneath the heavy fabric and the excessive amount of deodorant he was wearing.

  “He used to be kind of nice,” he said to Ward. “Like, he’d let the kids come over if one of us was having a birthday party or something. But now he’s divorced, and he doesn’t let them into our territory anymore, and he’s tired of being the guardian, but he won’t give it up because he doesn’t know what else he’d do.”

  That sounded like a surprisingly accurate assessment of John’s thinking. I was a little surprised Roman had come up with it. He was a great kid, but not always the best at interpersonal cues. He’d mastered a lot of being a werewolf, but subtle arts like reading and interpreting scents were still tough for him.

  “He sounds like a bummer.”

  “He can be,” Sam agreed. “But he’s been the guardian here since our mother was alpha, and he always got along well with her. I think he stays in part because he’s not sure he trusts anyone else to look after our pack. He’s a sweet guy, deep down inside.”

  “Deep, deep down.” I slowed going over an icy cattle guard. “Deep, deep, deep, deep, deep—”

  “You’ve made your point, Henry.”

  “I don’t know,” I mused. “I think I’m still a little shy of just how buried John’s regard for us is these days.”

  “He’s unhappy, and that always brings a person’s worst traits to the surface. He’ll get better.”

  “Clara left over a year ago, Sam. That’s a long time to get used to someone’s absence.”

  “And she was with him for twenty years before that, so stop being mean to John.”

  “Why didn’t she take the kids?” Ward asked out of the blue. “I mean, when the alternative is leaving them in the middle of nowhere with their dad. Why did she leave them behind?”

  “Taking them was never an option,” Tennyson said unexpectedly. “Guardians are the keepers of the packs, given positions of extreme responsibility for our actions and our safety. A guardian is sworn to secrecy and generally experiences quite a bit of privation along with their service. If they get too close to the pack, they’re deemed unfit to remain objective. If they’re too distant, then they won’t care enough for the members to keep them safe. A good guardian knows how to negotiate for what he or she wants, in exchange for this voluntary isolation. They probably let John keep his children with him because he would be lost without them, and his functionality is more important than his ex-wife’s desires.”

  Ward sighed. “That’s not very fair to his kids.”

  “Probably not, but once they turn eighteen, they can leave. Of course, they’ll be sworn to secrecy too. If they give up the location of the pack, it’s considered treason.”

  “Oh.”

  I hoped, a little meanly, that Ward was thinking about whoever had told him how to find us. I hoped he got exactly what a risk that person was taking for him and just how dire it would be if that person was revealed at this point. Ward needed to get used to the fact that he wouldn’t be talking to him or her again.

  Sacrifice. Caution. Danger. That was the reality of being a werewolf in America, and in the quiet of my own mind, I could acknowledge that Liam had a point when he said not all the old ways were necessarily good ones.

  We got to the trailhead in a little under an hour. There were actually a few SUVs there, probably climbers trying to do winter ascents of San Luis. It was one of Colorado’s famous fourteen-thousand-foot peaks, and a subset of avid outdoor lovers made it a goal to climb them all. Once they’d climbed all fifty-three in the summer, some
of those people decided to do them again in the snow, struggling up the invisible trail on snowshoes or cross-country skis. More power to them.

  I got out and joined John at the edge of the parking lot, just beyond the brick latrines. He lifted a pair of binoculars and looked north across the valley. A creek ran down the middle of the basin here, fast running in the summer but hopefully frozen solid enough to get the snowcat across today.

  “Should be any time now,” he said.

  “Good. I’d rather not run into any hikers.”

  “Eh, I don’t worry about folks like that,” John said. “They’re not going to walk onto pack territory and probably wouldn’t even think to wonder if you’re werewolves. It’s the hunters on their damn four-wheelers that have been giving me shit lately. I’ve been everything from a park ranger to animal control to an angry rancher in the last month.”

  “Did you let Sam know about the incidents?”

  He grunted an affirmative. “She put in a request last month to expand the camera system to some of the easiest entry points for outsiders that don’t take the road and add some motion detectors. I’ll monitor those.”

  “It would be nice. Although we still haven’t gotten decent replacements for what’s looking after the fence, so I’m a little skeptical of getting more. Liam’s repairing the latest breakdown this morning.”

  “You might not be on the best of terms with your minder, but that doesn’t mean I’m not.”

  I angled my face toward him. “My minder?”

  “What else would you call Hill?”

  “My boss. My commanding officer. I don’t need a minder.”

  John snorted. “What the hell do you think I am, then?”

  “A public servant,” I replied. “And one who can be replaced, if his job is so onerous for him and his family.”

  John put down the binoculars and looked at me. “It’d be a lot less onerous if you did your job out there, Alpha. Aren’t you supposed to be good at fetching things for the government? Why does it seem so hard for you lately?”

  I tamped down on my anger. This wasn’t the John I knew. “What’s going on with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t buy that. You’re blunt, but you’ve never been openly disrespectful before, and I’d like to know why.”

  John pursed his lips together and then blew out a breath. “Genna hasn’t decided where she wants to go to school yet.”

  “Why is that a problem?”

  “Because she’s got options,” he snapped. “Good ones. She’s smart, and she’s gotten scholarships to half a dozen schools. But she hasn’t picked yet, and she won’t tell me why not. She’s even talked about taking a year off. Something’s wrong with her, and she won’t tell me what.” He lifted the binoculars again, trying to end the conversation. I didn’t let him, though.

  “It might be because she’s worried about you and the boys,” I suggested. “Maybe she wants to stay an extra year for her own peace of mind, to make sure you’ll all be okay without her.”

  “She’s my kid, not my mother. She shouldn’t worry about that.”

  I shrugged. “Then maybe you need to ask yourself what’s going on that would make her act like that.”

  John drew in his breath to respond, but just then a small green-and-white plane appeared over the edge of the mountains. The rumble of its engine bounced off the snow, and as it dipped down, the side door of the plane opened and crates fell out, parachutes catching just in time for the cargo to hit the ground gently. There were five in total, spread over a span of a hundred yards.

  “Let’s go.”

  I had Sam drive the snowcat, and Ward and Genna rode with her. The terrain would be tough for humans in the summer—in the winter, it was too rough for them to even think about crossing without specialized equipment. John stayed on the high ground and kept in touch with me via walkie, guiding us to the places the crates had sunk into the ground. We got the first three easily enough, but one had ended up half sunk in the creek, and it took Tennyson, Roman, and me working together to heave it out and up the embankment, through dead, clinging willows and half-frozen muck that stuck to our legs like muddy tentacles. It had to weigh over five hundred pounds.

  We took a break before heading after the last one, which was nestled in a snowbank at the very head of the valley. Ward handed me a thermos of hot sweet tea while Sam helped Tennyson get the last crate tied down, and I took it gratefully.

  “Hard work,” he commented as I sipped. My metabolism kept me warm enough to ignore the cold for the most part, but even it had a tough time combating the chill of near-freezing water made worse by the wind sweeping down off the cap of San Luis. “How often do you do this?”

  “Every few months. We try to be as self-sustaining as possible. We have an orchard, some of the pack keeps cows and chickens, we grow our own vegetables, and we can and preserve things for the winter. But some things we just can’t get anywhere else. Flour. Sugar. Batteries. Blu-rays that are on the approved content list.” I shrugged. “So we relay what we want, we get a list of what they’ve got, and then John schedules a drop.”

  “And that works? I mean, it’s enough to keep you guys going?”

  “We’re not that big a pack,” I explained gently. “And we share everything we’ve got. It’s kind of utopian, in a way.”

  “In a way,” he agreed. I could smell the doubt in him and knew he was probably thinking about what Liam had said last night.

  “It’s not perfect.” I knew that. God, did I ever know that. No one knew it firsthand like me, not even Sam, for all she’d been through and for all I’d confided in her. “But it’s what we’ve got for now.”

  “I know.”

  I handed back the thermos, and he started to cap it. “Drink some of that yourself,” I told him. “The last thing you need is to catch a chill and end up getting pneumonia or something because we didn’t take good enough care of you.”

  “It’s not your place to take care of me.”

  “It is now, though,” I said earnestly. “You’re my pack.” You feel like pack. You might feel like more. I couldn’t tell him the last part, but it was real for me. It was good, a distraction, something that seemed special and just for me. It didn’t matter if I never shared it, as long as I could have it.

  Ward smiled a half smile, the kind that curled his chapped pink lips up on the right-hand side. “I guess you’ve got a point.”

  “Damn straight I’ve got a point.” I watched him drink with a curl of satisfaction, and after a moment, the warm, sweet smell of arousal carried across the air. But—it wasn’t Ward’s arousal. Wait.

  I looked around and saw Genna and Roman a little ways away, sharing a thermos of cider and smiling as they talked quietly, even too quietly for me to hear. The scent, while almost overpowered by his clothes and deodorant, was Roman’s.

  Oh shit. Just what we needed, Roman falling for the guardian’s daughter. And from the look of things—from the smell of things, dammit—she felt the same way. It plucked at my sense of danger even while it filled me with sympathy. They couldn’t help who they liked—hell, in circumstances like this, where they’d hardly known anyone else close to their ages for their whole lives, it was almost inevitable that they’d fall for each other. I wondered if they knew it was mutual.

  I wondered if John knew. Or if he at least suspected. That might go a ways toward explaining his recent animosity.

  “Are you going to get that last crate any time soon, or can we all look forward to freezing our asses off for the next hour?”

  I picked up the walkie. “We’ll be on it in a minute.” I turned to Sam and Tennyson. “Is that crate secure?”

  “It is now,” Sam said, ratcheting the final tie-down.

  “Let’s go get the last one, then.”

  It took almost another hour to retrieve it—the snowcat was heavy with the rest of the supplies at this point, and the terrain was too steep to get it any closer than a hundred yards of
the crate. This one was pretty light, though, and once we’d pulled it free of the snow, we slung it up in a net, and I gripped the free ends tight and slung them over my shoulders. “I’ll pull. You two push,” I instructed my wolves, and they moved to obey. It felt good, working together, and I was able to forget doomed romances and my own sad, stupid heart as we hauled the crate down to the snowcat.

  By the time we got there, I was breathing hard and had to get rid of my jacket to keep from overheating. It took another ten minutes to figure out how to make room for the thing. Once we were done, I turned into the wind and stood still for a long moment, letting the sweat cool on my forehead and neck and loving how intense it felt, how alive I was in that moment.

  Want… there was the scent of arousal again, this time more spicy than sweet, somehow familiar even though I had never smelled anything quite like it before. I opened my eyes and looked over, even though I didn’t need to know who it was. Ward stood a few feet back, his arms wrapped tight around his chest and not inviting touch, his expression a mystery, but his scent…. Oh. I smelled want in him, directed right at me, and it filled me with the most amazing sense of satisfaction I could remember. I wasn’t alone in this. Even if we never spoke of it, I wasn’t alone.

  The walkie crackled to life, breaking the moment. I picked it up to answer. “Yeah, John?”

  “You need to get back here,” he said. He sounded grim. “We’ve got trouble.”

  I frowned. “What kind of trouble?”

  “I just got a call from the sheriff’s office in Monte Vista. There’s been a string of pet killings over the past twenty-four hours, and they’ve got a description of the animal responsible. Apparently it looks like a white wolf.”

  My heart sank. Oh, no. Wilson. “Do they have it in custody?”

  “Not yet. But the deputies are on the lookout for it. You know what this means.”