She squirmed to get out of his grasp but Aaron dug deep through the pain and held her still. “No don’t,” he said, “Don’t leave.”
“I could make you let me go,” she said.
“But you won’t.”
There was that scent again. Despite the dirt, despite the stream and the blood, Aaron caught her honey scent again. He noticed now that her scent was stronger and that simply smelling her made his mouth water, but the strange aftertaste was there. It hadn’t been this that caused Aaron block her attempt to kiss him, though; it had been Amber.
Aaron’s grip on Jackal’s shoulders relaxed. His arms dropped to his side, limp, and she straightened herself out again, returning to her knees. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know. Well, no, that’s a lie. I did know. I can smell her on you even now. I just didn’t know how serious it was.”
“It’s alright,” Aaron said, interrupting. “As long as it doesn’t happen again.”
“It won’t. Can’t blame a girl for trying to get what she wants, though, right?”
Aaron shook his head. “Even if now isn’t the time to get it.”
She made a pshhh sound with her lips, smiled, and tapped Aaron on the wounded shoulder. Aaron flinched. The pain was instant, but weaker than before. “You’re already healing,” she said. “Besides; a good fight always makes werewolves smell... desirable.”
“You call that a good fight?”
“It was for me. I don’t know what the hell you were doing.”
A lull in the conversation came, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable one. Aaron could hear the crickets chirping in the forest again as his strength returned, though he knew he wasn’t able to walk under his own power just yet. Then he remembered his father’s words, ethereal in his mind.
Your blood too, he had said to Jackal, and a piece of the puzzle fell into place.
“We’re related,” Aaron said.
Jackal nodded.
“And you tried to kiss me.”
“Relax,” Jackal said, waving her hand, “Third cousins.”
“Third cousins,” Aaron repeated. He realized then how little of his father’s side of the family he actually knew. How many more cousins did he have? Uncles and aunts? Then another, more obvious thought came hurtling at him like a freight train: brothers or sisters. He decided not to ask Jackal. This was a conversation for his father.
“So, this girl,” Jackal said. “What’s her name?”
Aaron propped himself up on his good arm and flexed the fingers on his wounded arm. The pain was almost gone, much to Aaron’s relief. “Amber,” he said.
Jackal dipped her hand in the stream and poured a little more cold water on Aaron’s shoulder. It stung, but then it felt better again. “That’s a pretty name,” she said. “How’d you guys meet?”
“I’ve known her for years. She was dating one of my best friends, so we met through him.”
“What a cliché.”
“It doesn’t end like the cliché,” Aaron said, angry memories stirring up inside of him like a thunderstorm roiling in the distance. “He turned into a jerk when he went to college. Amber took a year out to go to Europe and he spent most of it cheating on her. I was around when they’d talk on the phone sometimes but I couldn’t say anything to her. We weren’t friends, you know? Didn’t feel like it was my place.”
Jackal studied his face. “There’s more to it than that,” she said, “Isn’t there?”
Aaron sighed. “I wasn’t exactly nice to her, either. She was different. Wore a lot of black. She was a little weird. A part of me liked that about her, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself. Even after we hooked up the first time I still probably didn’t treat her the way I should have treated her. Damn near almost lost her completely to another guy.”
Jackal pressed her lips together and nodded.
“But I have a real shot with her now and I don’t want to mess it up. I won’t.”
“Do you love her?” she asked, out of the blue.
The storm inside Aaron’s chest receded until he could no longer hear it. In his mind he pictured a bright sun climbing over the horizon, bathing the world in amber light and warmth. He smiled to himself and then brought his eyes up to meet Jackal’s.
“I do,” he said. “But I don’t think she’s ready to hear it just yet.”
“I can’t say I’m not jealous. But you know… a true wolf stays loyal to his mate, even in the wild. That I can respect. Consider me entirely backed off.”
Aaron smiled. “Thanks,” he said.
He struggled to stand, feeling like he finally could. Jackal helped. The world spun for a moment, but Aaron staggered toward the tree he had propped himself up on earlier and used it to steady his standing until the nausea passed. His body ached, but the ache was minor now. A scratch, he thought.
“We should head back,” she said, “We have to regroup with the others.”
“No,” Aaron said, “I want to get to the end of the trail.”
“Aaron, you’re hurt and your clothes are torn.”
“I don’t need clothes. The cold won’t bother me much once we get walking and I can always put on the wolf form if it gets too cold, right?”
“I guess so.”
“So I’m going to finish this trail. You can come with me or you can go back, but I don’t want to be the wolf that runs home with his tail between his legs because a cat scared him off.”
“Aaron,” Jackal said, protesting.
The Cougar was out there somewhere, and if Jackal was right he would have healed by now; and if he came for them again Aaron didn’t know what would happen. But he had made up his mind, and it would take more than Jackal to change it.
CHAPTER 7
Getting used to the cold wasn’t difficult. Aaron’s body adjusted, his internal body heat rising rapidly to fight the creeping chills that wanted to shut him down. But Aaron needed fuel to feed his internal furnace and he had no food on him. His stomach growled and ached, but Aaron didn’t complain. He could eat when he was done with this trial.
Jackal found the trail again soon enough and they were walking again. Aaron had considered running in his wolf form to the finish line but Jackal advised against it. Too loud, she had told him. The sound of their heavy paws would draw just about every Cougar for miles. They were lucky to only have had to deal with one.
But the trek ahead was long, the threat of danger imminent, and survival not guaranteed. Aaron’s wounds still hadn’t completely healed and the cold was making them ache, even if the rest of his body was toasty. He wanted, needed, to take his mind of the ache, so he decided to talk.
“You should tell me your story,” he said to Jackal.
She cocked her head. “Now?”
“I told you mine. Seems as good a time as any.”
“Shouldn’t we be keeping our ears peeled for more Cougars?”
“If our friend wanted to call more of his friends he would have done it by now, don’t you think?”
“And what do you know about werecougars?”
“Nothing,” he said, “But I know cocky assholes, and he seemed like one.”
“How so?”
Aaron paused. Thought. “There were two of us,” he said, “He didn’t know anything about us so he warned us instead of attacking. That was clever. But he tried to take us both on when we went for him instead of running away and getting his friends. And now that we’ve had a roll in the dirt he knows I’m green, so he probably thinks he can take me down and then go back to his people with a trophy.”
“Aren’t you forgetting me? I bit him good, and I got him in a spot he’ll remember being bitten in. You might be green but I’m not.”
“That’s why I said that he thinks he can take me down. When he comes back, he’ll come alone.”
Jackal smiled to herself and turned her eyes to the path again. “You’re learning pretty quickly.”
“You shouldn’t have doubted that I would.”
She sighe
d. “So I guess that means I should start talking, then.”
“You don’t want to?”
“It’s not that.”
“I’ll tell you mine.”
“Haven’t you already?”
“Not all of it. There’s more. A lot more.”
Aaron hadn’t explained to Jackal or his father the exact particulars about his first night as a werewolf. He hadn’t told them about the cultists, about Amber’s demon, nor about the fact that Amber was a witch with real power or that she had set an entire building ablaze with silver fire. He figured he had an interesting story to tell, but he hadn’t had more than five minutes of conversation with another werewolf besides Jackal. He wondered what her first night was like.
Jackal sighed again. Aaron got the impression that she didn’t want to talk about herself all that much, but as the silence swelled he could tell that she was only trying to find the words; or the courage. Aaron decided to help.
“You single?” he asked.
Jackal’s serious face lightened. Her cheeks flushed with red, Aaron saw. “I wouldn’t have tried to kiss you if I wasn’t.”
“I guess not.”
“I don’t do the dating thing much. It’s different for girls.”
“In what way?”
“Well, when a female sees a man she’s attracted to a switch gets flipped in her mind and she has to make a choice. Fuck or mate.”
“What’s the difference?”
“There’s a saying: a fuck is for now, a mate is for life. Once a female has been a werewolf for long enough she gets to a point where her body starts urging her to breed. If that female then fucks the same guy a couple of times he becomes a mate, and a mate better bring the female a kid or she’ll get pretty damn mad.”
“That’s harsh,” he said, empathizing, but the next question had to be asked. “Do you have any kids?”
Jackal shook her head. “Marcus taught me the lesson early.”
“So you’ve only ever slept with the same guy once.”
“No,” she admitted, “There was this one guy I really liked. Part of me didn’t want to have kids but the other part of me just wanted to spend time with him and smell him. So I went back to him one night and then one thing led to another and we slept together. The next morning I had him again, then again after lunch, then again at night. I couldn’t stop.”
“What happened?”
“He bolted that night while we slept,” she said. “I never saw him again.”
“You didn’t track him down?”
“I could have, but I might have killed him when I found him. And besides, the moment passed. I don’t feel the urge anymore. Some females learn to control it after a while, so now I’m just looking for the right person to settle with.”
“So you don’t want kids?”
Jackal shook her head. “Not right now. Maybe one day, but not now.”
An owl hooted nearby, drawing Aaron’s focus away from his conversation with Jackal. He remembered a time where he couldn’t have spotted an owl hooting in a tree with such quickness, but he could now. It was dark and spotted, with eyes like molten gold, staring at him from above.
“What about your change?” he asked. “It didn’t seem like you wanted to talk about that.”
“I was thirteen,” she started to say, having found her words. “Or, at least, I was about to turn thirteen. It was my birthday. I remember my mother went to the store and bought me a big vanilla sponge cake with white chocolate butter cream. It had strawberries on it too. She couldn’t afford much but she’d been saving up for a while knowing that my birthday was coming. Had this whole box full of streamers and decorations ready to set up around the house for the party she was going to throw me…”
Jackal had trailed off and shut up. Aaron looked at her and caught the sparkle in her eyes. She turned away and ran the back of her hand discreetly across her cheek. “You okay?” he asked.
“I woke up that morning with a fever,” she said. “Sweat had soaked right through the mattress and everything. Looked like I had taken a fire-hose to the bed. I wasn’t sure what had happened so I gathered the sheets, flipped the mattress, and put the sheets in the washer. I showered while my mom and my aunt made the house up. When I came down the whole house was decked out. I didn’t know how to tell them that I wasn’t feeling great, though, so I kept quiet. Something was wrong. I could feel it. I’d get hot and cold all day, would hear and see things everywhere, and when my friends came over all I wanted was for them to leave. Everything pissed me off; the food, the people, the music. I really thought I was going to hurt someone.”
“Something like that happened to me too,” Aaron said, “The fever, I mean.”
Jackal nodded. “So I excused myself and locked myself in my room,” she said. “I didn’t come back out until everyone had left. My mom was alone in the kitchen cleaning dishes when I showed up. There was a piece of cake waiting for me on the counter with a candle sticking out of it. When I sat down at the table my mom turned around looking sad and mad. I tried to apologize but she came at me, grabbed the piece of cake from the counter and threw it into the trash right in front of me.”
Aaron swallowed the pain he felt for her.
“When I came to,” she continued, “I was naked, in a ditch some three miles away from home, and covered in dry blood. That’s when Marcus found me.”
“I’m sorry,” Aaron said.
Jackal shrugged. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t hers, either. For a while I thought it was my fault, but I don’t believe that anymore. My mom was upset and I get that; she was just unlucky that her daughter turned out to be a werewolf.”
“That’s rough. I’m sorry I asked.”
“You were going to ask me eventually.”
“I guess I was.”
“So how about you tell me yours? You kill anyone?”
“I did,” Aaron said, unashamed. “But they’d killed me first. One of them put three bullets in my chest.”
“And you got back up,” Jackal said, coolly.
“Yeah. I don’t remember much about what happened either. I remember the bullets, remember hitting the snow and watching them take Amber away, then I remember feeling powerful and—”
“They took Amber away? You’re going to have to back up. Who were they?”
Shit, Aaron thought. He hadn’t told anyone about Amber being a witch. No point hiding it now. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said, smug, “Amber is a witch. The guys who were trying to kill us were part of some demon cult who wanted to kill her and sell her to the devil.”
By the blank expression on Jackal’s face Aaron assumed she had never encountered a true witch like Amber before. It was either that, or she thought he was bat shit crazy. But Jackal was difficult to read most of the time, and that didn’t do Aaron much good now as he waited for her to process what she had heard and figure out how to reply.
Finally, Jackal laughed hard. From the belly. Her voice spilled into the woods so sharp and loud that for the second time tonight Aaron felt like every Cougar on the path would be on them at the drop of a hat. But he held his serious face and waited for the fit of laughter to end, and for her smile to fade.
“Oh, you’re serious,” she said. “I’m sorry, I just thought you were trying to fuck with me.”
“Why would I make something like this up?”
“I don’t know. As a goof? I mean, I didn’t even know witches existed until just now; I guess I didn’t know how to react.”
“Witches are real,” he said, “And they have real power, too. I’ve seen it now. I don’t know how one compares to a Mountain Cougar, but Amber’s pretty formidable.”
“Formidable,” she echoed. “I like that word.”
They continued walking down the mountain trail until they reached a part that looked almost like an artificial fork in the road. A human wouldn’t have seen the dirt path that broke off into the trees, but Aaron noticed it.
“I have an idea,” Jackal
said, stopping at the fork.
“What’s that?” Aaron asked. He was on alert now that their conversation had come to an end. Colors were sharper, now, the smell of wet earth and leaves and animal shit stronger and more pungent.
“We could keep going down the trail, or we can take a detour that’ll take us some place way more dangerous.”
“What’s in it for us if we go to the dangerous place?”
“Glory.”
A wicked grin spread across Aaron’s face. “I think we’re getting to understand each other better already,” he said, gesturing for her to lead the way.
CHAPTER 8
The dull throb in Aaron’s shoulder and sides had been reduced to slight stinging sensations by the time he came to the end of the path. Looking down at his arm Aaron couldn’t believe that moments ago it had been torn up so badly he could see his own muscle tissue. But the flesh had healed quickly, knitting together of its own accord by regenerative powers he didn’t understand. It would leave a scar, but something deep inside of Aaron told him it was okay; that he would wear it with pride and learn to love it.
The wound on his side, however, was proving harder to heal. Stretching too far to the right sent a sharp pain ripping directly into Aaron’s head. He wondered if the Cougar had ripped a nerve and hoped it would heal soon, but Aaron couldn’t do anything to speed the healing process so he simply endured.
The dirt path Aaron and Jackal had stepped on to brought them to a steep vertical drop. At the foot of the drop, a valley stretched out that was thick with tall trees. The valley rolled down cutting a deep gash in the mountain. A trickle of water, glinting in the moonlight, trailed along the valley’s center.
Aaron took a deep breath of fresh air, winced at the shot of pain in his side, and exhaled.
“Is this all theirs?” Aaron asked.
Jackal nodded. “Territory tends to swap hands often, but this is the only place the Cougars have been able to keep for themselves for a long time. They’re good at defending it.”
“Then why aren’t they stopping us?”
Forged in Moonfire Page 4