High Moon

by Kati Wilde

  Smiling around Makena makes sense but transforming into a werewolf doesn’t. Yet my body keeps wanting to do it. As if her presence is provoking all my protective instincts. Or maybe my instincts are just trying to introduce themselves to her.

  Whatever it is, I need to get a handle on this. She’ll always be safe with me. But it’d kill me if she ever felt the need to be safe from me.

  “Ethan?”

  “I’m all right,” I say and add a cowardly, “You should go and get your lunch.” Because I love her scent but I’m drowning here in the deep end.

  But I better keep swimming, because she settles in a little more, stretching out her long legs. “I’m still working on breakfast.” She pats her lean belly. “And crowds aren’t my thing, so I’ll probably hide in here with you a while.”

  The thought of her hiding away with me sounds damn fine. It’d sound better if she wasn’t lying. I suspect the reason she’s really staying is to make sure that I’m not about to keel over.

  “Anyway,” she says a little more softly, “I like being in here. It might sound a little weird, but…this shed hasn’t smelled like this for a long time. I didn’t realize how much it would remind me of my mom.”

  Or maybe her reason for staying isn’t about me at all. And I’m not a bit sorry, if it means learning more about the woman Makena is—and the girl she was. “Your mom did the butchering?”

  “Yeah.” A heavy note thickens her voice. Closing her eyes, she draws in a long breath—then falls silent.

  Hurt’s coming off her, but it’s the bittersweet kind of hurt that accompanies good memories and not the kind of hurt that anyone needs protecting from. So I quiet down and continue working.

  About ten minutes pass before I realize she’s looking my direction, her eyes no longer closed but slitted open and unfocused. Like maybe she’s half-asleep or idly watching while her mind’s busy with other subjects.

  Subjects such as what I told her this morning. “What’s it like, smelling things as well as you do?” she suddenly asks.

  I shrug and tell her the truth. “I’ve always been able to, so it’s normal to me. It’s everyone else that seems to walk around with a muffler over their nose.”

  She smiles at that. “A muffler’s not such a bad thing. Especially in the barn.” Her eyes widen a bit. “Working a ranch must be bad. Everything smells that much stronger.”

  I shake my head and swing a new carcass into place over the offal tub. “It’s not bad or good. Some things smell more interesting than others, but it’s just…another way of seeing, maybe. Like putting on those glasses at the fair.”

  “Like…what?”

  I suppose that was a jump she couldn’t follow. “I don’t see color. So—”

  Her burst of laughter stops me. But she holds up her hand and says through a giggle, “Sorry. Usually when people say that… Never mind. You mean you’re colorblind? Like, really colorblind?”

  “I am. I see colors, but they’re apparently not what most people see. Like this”—I tap a hanging carcass—“I know is red. But ‘red’ to me isn’t like the red you see. And if a green cow was hanging here, I might not see much difference. Most of my life, I didn’t even realize there was a real difference. I knew I was colorblind but didn’t know what I was missing.”

  She looks fascinated. “Then you found out?”

  “At a state fair last year. After helping one of my bosses bring in some livestock, I was walking around and went into a booth where they had a bunch of posters and paintings hanging up, and a pair of special glasses. And it was…” My throat tightens up just remembering it. “I had no fucking idea the world looked like that.”

  “Beautiful,” she says softly.

  “Well, it was already beautiful. But it added a whole other layer to seeing that I didn’t realize was there.”

  Understanding dawns on her face. “And scent does that for you, instead. It adds another layer to the way you perceive the world.”

  I nod. “Except I don’t think of it as another layer. Because it’s as normal to me as seeing color is to you.”

  “Would you trade?” She cocks her head, eyeing me curiously. “Would you give up smelling things if you could see the proper colors?”

  “No.” Not if it meant I couldn’t breathe her in like I’m doing now. Or if the air while she was near was the same as when she was gone. “Though I wouldn’t mind having a pair of those glasses to look through.”

  Especially if I was looking at her. Although I can’t imagine her being any more beautiful than she is right now, as amusement lights her dark eyes and curves her full mouth.

  “I read a book once about a guy with a nose like yours, but he used it to make the most incredible perfumes. Then he became a serial killer, because he couldn’t resist the way virgins smelled. So he succumbed to his darker impulses and made perfume out of them.”

  I’ve read that book, too, but it wasn’t because of his ability to smell. Instead it was because he didn’t have a scent himself—just like the fuckers I’ve been hunting.

  Search long enough, you start looking for answers anywhere. Often in fictional stories there’s a kernel of truth—just like there’s a bit of truth in werewolf lore. But if there were answers in that book, I didn’t recognize them. Just as if fact were red and fiction was green, they don’t look any different if you don’t know there should be a difference.

  I wryly glance at the bloody bone saw in my hand and tell her, “I’ll try to control my darker impulses.”

  She grins. “Even if you don’t, I figure I’m safe. Only virgins smell that good.”

  No, only she does. And if virgins smell different from non-virgins, I’ve sure as hell never noticed it.

  But I figure that neither one of those responses will keep her feeling safe—and footsteps nearing the shed tell me this private time with her is about to end, anyway.

  “Hey, Makena.” It’s a woman that I met while I was in the yard getting lunch—Christy or Crystal, I think her name was. The one who must have baked the chocolate chip cookies because she still smells like them. She’s around Makena’s age, wearing cutoffs and a halter top, with light hair pulled up in a ponytail. “Is it all right if I take a couple of these kids down to the swimming hole?”

  “The swimming hole?” Makena blinks like that’s the last thing she expected. “Yeah. Of course.” She gets up from her crate. “I think there’s some inner tubes in the barn. They’re all deflated but there’s an air compressor in the… Oh crap. Actually, I can’t get into the workshop until Kyle gives me the all-clear that the forensic guys have looked in there.”

  “I’ve got a tire pump in the car. And thank you so much. These kids are in for a treat.” Christy-or-Crystal smiles brightly, then glances over at me. “That swimming hole made her the most popular girl in our class every summer. At least until the summer before senior year, when everyone was worried that the bears would come back—” She abruptly breaks off and a pained expression crosses her face. “Oh, Makena. I’m so sorry. Me and my big stupid mouth.”

  Because her parents were killed by bears on the property. But Makena shrugs it off. “No worries. I’m not the first girl who got popular by letting a bunch of people into her hole.”

  Dissolving into laughter, the other woman shakes her head. “Not the first girl to get popular that way, no. But maybe the first to have a bunch of people jumping out of a tree to get into that hole.”

  “Oh, I bet I’m far from the first to do that, either. Just last week, Carrie sent me a link to a video like that, except they were jumping off a trapeze,” Makena says dryly, then glances at me. “You want a Coke or anything other than that water?”

  “I’m good.” Mostly just wondering what position the trapeze people ended up in.

  “All right. But it’s going to get hot in here before too long, so if the fan’s not keeping up, just let the rest of this wait until tomorrow. These cows aren’t in any hurry.”

  “Oh, Makena. Honey. It
’s already hot in here,” Crystal-or-Christy observes, her sparkling gaze raking me up and down. “So maybe instead of giving him a fan, you ought to introduce him to your swimming hole.”

  “Annnnnnd now that’s enough out of that mouth.” A grinning Makena claps her palm over her friend’s lips and begins steering her backward out of the shed. “Say goodbye to Makena’s nice, new employee who hopefully isn’t going to file a harassment suit.”

  A muffled ‘goodbye, nice employee’ emerges as Makena drags her outside. About five steps away from the shed, Makena starts groaning in embarrassment and her friend says that she just peed a little from laughing. Followed by, “The way he looks at you, I don’t think you have to worry about any lawsuit. The only worry you ought to have is whether you’ll be torn in half.”

  She hasn’t even seen me in my warrior’s skin. Though that’s no real worry at all. No matter his size, any man with a working brain knows you don’t go diving into a swimming hole without first making sure it’s nice and wet.

  Makena wasn’t kidding about the heat, though. The shed sat in the shade of the barn for most of the morning, but as soon as the sun shines down on it bright and full, the temperature inside soars. Which isn’t a problem for me—I’ll sweat, but I could run into a fire and come out all right. So the heat’s nothing. But a dip in a cold swimming hole starts to sound better and better.

  Especially since I’m not the only one in the shed. Alf and Thelma have been tagging along beside me all day. Even sending them out to play doesn’t help. They’ll reluctantly go but they don’t stay gone. I give them a good spray with the hose every time I wash out a carcass, but by mid-afternoon, I figure that Makena’s right. These cows aren’t going anywhere. And there’s plenty else to do.

  I pull off the bloody leather apron, give my hands a good wash, then turn the hose over my head. I look up when Thelma yips in excitement. Old Alf lets out a baying welcome and they both take off out of the shed—the first time they’ve left my side without me first sending them away.

  Bemused, I head out to the yard. A good number of people are still around, and townsfolk have been coming and going all day. Some of the rigs have been pulling trailers so they can haul away a load of meat.

  The man just pulling in now is hauling a trailer, too, but he’s the first one who’s had living animals in it. Two horses.

  So this must be Jonas, Makena’s uncle—and who might be the one who decides whether I’m actually hired or not.

  All right, then. I drag my hand through my soaking hair, trying to appear a little more presentable for when Makena introduces us. But I’ve got a few minutes before that’ll happen, it looks like. Jonas takes a second to greet the dogs—and they sure as hell love him—but it’s Makena that he’s focused on.

  Making sure she’s all right. I know she called him earlier and assured him she was, but he must have driven like hell to get here and see for himself.

  Which makes me predisposed to liking the man, though he sure isn’t what I expected. At the bar last night, Sam called him foreign, and I must have made assumptions about what Sam meant by that. So it’s a bit of a surprise that Jonas Laine is one of the blondest men I’ve ever seen, and to hear the Scandinavian accent that seems to deepen while he’s greeting Makena.

  When she says my name and gestures in my direction, I take that as my cue to come over for an introduction.

  Jonas sizes me up the same way I do him. He’s about an inch taller than Makena, lean and wiry, and a bit older than I expected—probably on the other side of sixty, maybe even pushing seventy. He’s dressed the same as any rancher I’ve ever seen, in jeans and plain short-sleeved shirt, but the curious thing is that he doesn’t eye me the same way. There’s something in his quiet and steady focus that recalls men I served with in the military. Not the other soldiers, but the officers, giving him a confident air of quiet authority. The kind of man who’ll never bluster but grimly do what needs to be done.

  A horse’s high-pitched whinny pulls his gaze sharply away from me.

  From the trailer comes the quick stomp of hooves and thunk of metal as the fillies inside begin panicking.

  “Shit,” Makena swears as she takes off with her uncle toward the trailer. “They probably got wind of the butchering shed!”

  The probably got wind of me. Goddammit. This isn’t the kind of job interview I’d like to have, because instead of heading in to help them like any good ranch hand should, I take my ass downwind of the horses and keep my distance.

  Immediately they begin quieting, though their fear lies thick in the air. And me…for some reason, my instincts are screaming, and I’m real fucking uneasy. But my head isn’t nailing down the reason why. Instead it’s like something I can’t quite see out of the corner of my eye.

  Until Makena and her uncle come over, and I realize what it is. Because as I shake his hand, I’m standing downwind of him and I can smell the faint laundry soap clinging to his clothes, I can smell leather and horses and hay, I can smell the coffee he drank and the hamburger he ate. I can smell everything he’s worn and touched. But the man himself?

  He doesn’t have a scent at all.

  10

  Ethan

  I don’t know how the fuck I missed it. The truth has been staring me in the face from the second I got into Makena’s truck last night, when I smelled the lingering odors of a man and two dogs. I figured then that the man’s scent belonged to either her uncle or the ranch hand who quit. When I smelled the same scent in the workshop, I matched it up to her uncle. And I never fucking questioned why I hadn’t picked up a second male scent around the ranch. Probably because I was so distracted by Makena’s.

  But that scent had been Julio’s all along—and only Julio’s.

  Maybe I’d have figured it out eventually, when I got into the bunkhouse—which is where Julio was staying and which is still saturated with his scent. But maybe I’d have blindly stumbled along for days if Jonas hadn’t come home today. All because I couldn’t fucking count to two.

  Trying to figure out what to do now is ripping me up. Jonas not having a scent isn’t proof of anything—it doesn’t mean he murdered my family or any other kin. But here I am in a place that I thought might be related to their murders. After hearing about how Makena’s parents were killed, I’d gotten off the idea that there was any connection.

  Yet there is something here that’s affecting me. Makena, for one—and whatever the hell it was that ripped me apart this morning. Now, I can accept that some things simply don’t have any explanation beyond ‘magic.’ I can accept that there truly are coincidences that happen. So Jonas not having a scent might have nothing to do with anything.

  But that seems like a hell of a coincidence.

  So Jonas might not be the fucker I’m looking for, but I’d bet anything he has answers. I’m going to get those answers from him, one way or another. I’ve got no reservations about that. But that’s what’s ripping at me so bad. I’m fucking terrified that while I’m getting those answers, I’ll hurt Makena. Because all this time while hunting down my family’s killers, I never expected that someone might be stuck in the middle. I never expected that someone would be a woman I can’t bear to hurt.

  And if he’s not the fucker I’m looking for, nothing will change. I’ll help Makena out here, then move on, searching for the people responsible for my family’s murders. After I get justice for them, I’ll come back and see about starting up something permanent with Makena.

  But if he is the man I’m looking for, there’s no hope of that. If I killed him, Makena wouldn’t want me. And if don’t kill him, I couldn’t live here knowing what he’d done. So if he is that man…there’d be no hope either way for Makena and me.

  In the bunkhouse bathroom, I stand under the shower until the water runs cold before getting dressed in a clean pair of jeans and T-shirt. I’m supposed to head over to the main farmhouse for dinner. But I could just pick up and leave. Just head home. Because I need justice for my fam
ily more than I need anything. But if the cost of justice is going after Jonas and laying pain on Makena…I can’t do it.

  If Jonas is who I think he might be, though, then he’ll come after me. And if he shows up at my parents’ homestead in Montana, that’ll be something different. I’d just be defending myself.

  Even as I consider it, though, I know I’m not going anywhere. It wasn’t Jonas that killed Makena’s cattle last night. And it’s not Jonas who’s trying to take her land.

  So I’ll be patient. He might be the one I’m looking for or he might not be. But I can wait and watch him until this other shit that’s coming down on Makena is settled.

  And if he recognizes what I am before that…well, I’ve got a feeling he doesn’t want Makena in the middle, either. He cares for her. I couldn’t smell any emotions coming off him but I didn’t need to. Makena’s like a daughter to him.

  With the decision made, I head outside. The bunkhouse is about a five minute walk from the main house, with enough trees around for shade and privacy—and one of the better accommodations I’ve had in the past ten years of drifting.

  From the barn comes the sound of Makena putting the animals to bed. I doubt the horses are feeling up to me coming in to help her yet. Instead I slow my stride so that I’m passing by the building as she finishes up and comes out, plucking hay out of her corkscrew hair.

  Her face lights up when she sees me. “Hey, cowboy! You settle in okay?”

  “All unpacked,” I confirm.

  “Do you need anything for the house? Cleaning supplies, laundry soap, that kind of thing?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay. Let me know if you do. How did the deliveries go? Thanks for doing that, by the way.”

  “It was nothing.” Jonas hadn’t even finished getting his horses into the barn before Carrie showed up in the yard with a list of people who could sorely use a free month’s worth of pet food, but who couldn’t make it out to Makena’s ranch to pick it up.