Wolf Ways (The Madison Wolves Book 9)

by Robin Roseau

  She tightened her arms around me for a moment. “I’m glad, Zoe.”

  “Do you think there are games we could play where I wouldn’t suck though?”

  “We’ll put Michaela on that. She’ll think of something. Of course, you won’t beat her, but you might be able to hold your own against the rest of us.”

  I laughed. “Environmental Trivial Pursuit.”

  “There you go.”

  She gave me another minute then said, “As much as I enjoy this, Zoe, we have to get up.”

  “Workout clothes?”

  “Yep. Very light workout then breakfast at the alpha’s.”

  * * * *

  An hour later, I asked Portia, “What are they all doing here?”

  She grinned. “Helping us for an hour or so.”

  Hanging around her house were most of the pack enforcers, minus the three we’d just left behind at the alphas’ house. They were all in construction clothes.

  We greeted everyone, Portia thanking them for coming. Then she led the way to her garage, opening the door. Waiting for us were several ladders and a bench with a bunch of tools, most of which I didn’t recognize. Portia directed, and the wolves carried everything out. She handed me a pair of work gloves.

  “Pace yourself this morning,” she said. “This first part is hard work. Let the wolves do most of it. We only get them for a couple of hours, and then I’m really going to need you.”

  I nodded.

  “All right,” Portia said. “We have to strip everything down to the wood, but I want to get these tarps spread first. In twos, please grab a tarp and spread it out to give the shingles a place to land, all around the house.”

  It was Angel that grabbed me. We grabbed two of the tarps and went to the other side of the house. We spread it out and used rocks from the garden to hold the corners down.

  “We haven’t talked since Sunday. Did you have fun?”

  I laughed. “Everyone keeps asking that. Yes, I had fun. Yes, I’d play again.”

  “Good. There’s a campaign to make it a monthly event. I don’t think it will be that regular, just because we go to Bayfield a lot.”

  Portia made a circle of the house, declared everything ready, then sent us up the ladder. I found myself with Portia holding the ladder at the bottom and Rory waiting at the top to grab me as I stepped off.

  “You know, humans do this without werewolves watching out for them.”

  “Yeah, but you’re just a girl,” he said with a grin. “It wouldn’t be chivalrous to let you climb on and off the ladder without help.”

  “But you’ll let me paint the alpha’s house and nail shingles to Portia’s roof?”

  “You’re right!” he said. “I have some darning that needs doing.”

  I laughed. “I bet you don’t even know what darning is.”

  “It’s what you say when you’re not wolf enough to say ‘damn’,” Portia said, stepping up next to me. “Enough lolly-gagging. Let’s show the human how wolves work.”

  For the next hour, while I tried to help, mostly I just got in the way. Finally I sat at the peak of the roof and watched.

  The wolves were amazing. I keep saying that, I know, but again I was reminded. They weren’t reckless, but I was sure a human crew would take far longer than that.

  I actually felt kind of worthless and offered to fetch drinks for people, but Portia told me, “Your part is coming up soon. Watch and learn.”

  Soon, the roof was down to bare wood. Portia sent everyone around. “Look for any wood that looks rotted. If you find any, show it to me.”

  There were a couple of boards that they declared, “Soft.”

  “We’re going to rip them out,” Portia said, “But leave them there for now. We’ll do it after the delivery.”

  “Did you get a dumpster?”

  “It was supposed to be here yesterday, but they screwed up,” she replied. “It’ll be here this afternoon.”

  “We’ll come back and help dump everything,” Eric declared. “In fact, we’ll grab the kids from the program, too.” He looked at me. “We’ll take those drinks now.”

  It was twenty minutes later before a big, flatbed delivery truck appeared. It had a crane with a forklift attachment and was piled high with building materials. Portia talked to the driver for a few minutes, and then he backed the truck as close to the garage as he could. Soon he was operating the crane, lifting the palettes to the roof. He didn’t set them down. Instead, the wolves pulled the materials off, making piles along the peak of the roof.

  I tried to help, but they were heavy, and I almost dropped the first one. Portia told me to find a place I could stay out of the way.

  I felt worthless.

  It didn’t take them any time at all to unload everything, distributing the materials evenly in six piles along the roof peak. Portia thanked everyone.

  “Can we get those soft boards pulled out? I bought replacements.”

  Eric attacked one, and Rory went after the other. It took them only a minute or two before the old boards were pulled out. Portia found the replacements and dropped them into place. “Zoe and I can nail those,” she said. “Thanks guys.”

  There were several offers to stay behind and help, but she said, “Naw, now Zoe has to pay off her debt to society. If we get done too fast, I don’t know what I’d make her do next. And this will be real work for a little human like her.”

  The wolves laughed. I got my hair tousled. And a minute later, Portia and I were left alone.

  “You know, I don’t have a clue what to do.”

  “That’s okay. I do.” She gave me a safety lecture, and a few minutes later we were working together, driving nails into the boards that had been replaced.

  Using a hammer wasn’t as therapeutic as a paintbrush, but it was a nice change of pace. But I wondered how I would feel about it in a few hours.

  “Are we really going to do all this ourselves? It’ll take weeks.”

  She smiled. “Yes, we are, and no, it won’t. Wait until you see.”

  We finished nailing in the boards. Then Portia found a box of something called ‘water shield’. It came in a roll three feet wide by seventy-five feet long. One side had a sticky side after you peeled the protective paper back, and it went down on the roof nearest the gutters. Working together, we rolled it out and got it in place all along the edges. Then we did a second row overlapping the first by a few inches. This left the bottom six feet of the roof covered in the rubbery material.

  We switched to a different material after that, covering the entire roof to just below the shingles waiting in the big piles near the peak. We surveyed what we had done. Portia smiled.

  “All right,” she said. “Now we do chalk lines.”

  “I’m not that artistic,” I said. She glanced over to see me grinning.

  She had a little metal box with a string sticking out of it. You could pull on the string, and it came out of the box, covered in chalk. Portia handed me a tape measure and sent me to one end of the roof. She showed me how to measure. Then she had me hold one end of the string, went down to the other end, and called out a distance. I put the string down tight on the tape measure at the right distance. She did the same on her end, pulling it taut, and then she reached over, lifted the string away from the roof, then released it to slap against the roof.

  It left a clear, straight mark on the roof.

  “Cool!” I said.

  We did that over and over, all the way up the roof, leaving lines across the roof.

  “We’ll do the other side later,” she said. “Wait here.”

  She climbed down from the roof, was gone for a couple of minutes, then I heard her climbing back up. She was bringing some weird tool with her, dragging an air hose along behind her.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nailer. No hammers. You’ll see.” She arranged the hose the way she wanted then said, “Don’t trip over it.”

  “Important safety tip.”

 
; “All right. Let’s get started. What I want you to do is bring me shingles.”

  “I can’t carry them.”

  “Open a pack and bring them in handfuls,” she said. “Be careful not to break them.”

  I found I could bring a half pack of shingles at a time. Portia sat down on the roof, took a shingle from me, set it in place, then banged the end of the nailer against the shingle four times.

  “Next.”

  “Um. Portia. It’s backwards. The tabs go the other way.”

  She looked up at me. “Trust me. Next shingle please.”

  She put that one in place, nailed it, and then moved down for the next shingle.

  The nailer made a thwack sound every time she used it, a little like the paintball guns from Sunday. When I looked, I could see the heads of four shiny nails perfectly embedded into the shingles.

  “Okay, that’s cool,” I said.

  We got to the end and found ourselves with a shingle hanging out the end. “It’s too long.”

  “We cut them later,” she said. “You can cut them now, but you get a straight line if you cut later. Now we’ll go backwards.”

  So I kept bringing her shingles, and she worked back, laying the second shingles immediately on top of the first ones, but these were facing the right way.

  “Why did you do it that way?”

  “So that the open tabs have shingle behind them,” she said.

  “Oh. That should have been obvious.”

  After that, we worked our way up and across the roof. I brought shingles and Portia nailed them. I realized after the third time across that she was using the chalk lines to keep the shingles straight. It took another few trips to realize she was also staggering how the shingles were installed so the joints between them were not on top of each other.

  “Is that it?” I finally asked.

  “For most of it. The peak is different, and it’s a tiny bit harder to do the garage.” The garage was attached, but it was at a different level, with one edge against the side of the house. I would learn later in the week that wasn’t too bad to handle, either.

  Portia waited until we were a good third of the way up the roof before she said, “Okay, we’re far enough from the edge. Did you want to try it? You can work from below now.”

  “Could I?”

  Using the nailer was a little tricky, but it only took a few minutes before I was nailing shingles like a pro.

  “I told you that you’d earn your keep,” she said.

  After that, we traded off periodically, one of us doing the fetch and carry thing, the other running the nailer.

  “You could do this yourself if you set bundles around here and there,” I said.

  “Yes, but it’s still a lot faster with help, and the company is nice. Otherwise I’d let you keep working here and I’d head over to the other side.”

  “You have another nailer?”

  She smiled and nodded. “But I’d rather do it this way. Maybe if we get some volunteers to help this afternoon, then we’ll run two nailers at a time.”

  It was work, and of a type I wasn’t accustomed, but it was fun. We spent the time talking and teasing each other.

  We worked steadily the entire time, but when Portia declared a break, I was more than ready. “Lunch. Then we’re going to work for an hour or so before going for a swim.”

  “Oh, that will feel nice,” I agreed.

  * * * *

  Shortly after lunch, with us both back on the roof, a guy with a truck stopped by and dropped off the dumpster, asking Portia where she wanted it. She pointed to a place on the driveway. We didn’t even need to climb off the roof.

  It was more like an hour and a half when she straightened up, stretched her back, and said, “I think it’s time for that swim.”

  It had been my turn with the nailer. She pulled me to my feet. We put the tools to safety and then looked around, our arms around each other.

  “We have a problem,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re almost done with this side. We’re not going to spend my fifty hours this way.”

  “Afraid what I’ll make you do next?”

  “Do you have jobs lined up for me?”

  “Not enough. I’ve been turning down some of the requests.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t think you should have to do Rory’s laundry, for instance. Rory’s a really good guy, and I’m always happy to have him at my back, but he can be a jerk, too. They also wanted you to serve for an enforcer by-invitation picnic, but I vetoed that, too. I didn’t think it was right to make you serve food you find morally objectionable.”

  “I’d have been okay.”

  “They want to do a whole pig, and if I know them, they’d have made you carve it.”

  “They wouldn’t!”

  “Well, I don’t know how much support that idea had. There’s a picnic; it’s the weekend after next. And there’s nothing on the menu that you eat.”

  “Is there really a whole pig?”

  “Yep.”

  “Enforcers only?”

  “Enforcers and guests. Everyone is supposed to bring a date. Plus the alphas will be there.”

  “Who did you invite?”

  “I haven’t yet.”

  “Well, for the record, while I’ll never lecture any of you for your choice of food. If someone did a pig like that for pack play night, I wouldn’t say anything. But I’d be really upset if anyone expected me to cut it up or even serve her. Thank you for looking out for me.”

  She leaned over and kissed the top of my head. “You’re welcome.”

  “So, what jobs do you have lined up?”

  “There’s more maintenance on this house,” she replied. “And some fall planting. Gia wants some help setting up more electronic surveillance.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “It’s for the eagle nest. She thought you’d be good.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “You’ll be washing cars on Monday after the trip. We’ll get back too late on Sunday to do it. That’s a small one. Karen said she’s thinking about painting some rooms in her house.”

  “Has Monique submitted anything?”

  “No.”

  “I think she should, if she has anything.”

  “She happily let you take her shopping,” Portia said with a grin, “but no driving privileges. I’ll talk to her and let her know she should submit requests if she has any.”

  “I could help set up for that picnic,” I said. “But that’s only a few hours.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll get your hours in, but it might drag out a little. Would that bother you? I can get some of them converted to pack service hours if we don’t have enough things for the enforcers.”

  “I don’t want to let GreEN suffer, and I have errands on Thursday. Who is going to drive me?”

  “I am. Come on. Let’s go swim.”

  * * * *

  We swam laps; it felt good. I was much slower than Portia, but I swam slowly and steadily, loosening up and cooling off. Even though it was autumn, it was warm on the roof.

  Finally Portia called a halt, and we collected together in the shallow end. I couldn’t help but admire her body. I looked her up and down pointedly, and I didn’t mind that she caught me doing it. She raised an eyebrow.

  “What can I say? You’re stunning. Does it bother you to have your lesbian prisoner admire you?”

  She smiled. “Thank you. No, it doesn’t. Do you really think of yourself as my prisoner though?”

  “I was being light-hearted.” I moved closer. “Your skin is perfect. Your entire body is perfect.” I shook my head.

  “What?”

  “In my head, over and over, I keep using the same words. I am in awe. I think I always will be. In that video of Elisabeth, it wasn’t just her wolf that stunned me. I saw her as a human, as well. She was stunning as both. So are you. You all are.”

  “Do y
ou see differences?”

  “Between you and Elisabeth?”

  “Between any of us, other than color.”

  “I’m starting to. It’s harder for me when you’re wolves. You’re all huge. Even the teenagers are huge. The pups aren’t, but I can tell they’re going to be, as well.”

  “What notices do you see, say between Karen and me in fur. Have you noticed?”

  “Her head is blockier. If I were to compare it to canine counterparts, her head is more like a male black lab’s than yours, although of course, bigger. And you’re different colors. I’m sorry, should I see other differences?”

  “It’s probably hard with the fur. Karen, Elisabeth and Lara are all bigger than I am. Elisabeth is actually a little bigger than Lara and is the biggest female in the pack. In fur, Elisabeth has fifteen pounds or so on me. What about us as compared to the guys?”

  “Eric is bigger than Rory.” I thought about it. “Maybe about the same difference as between you and Elisabeth?”

  “Yes, perhaps.”

  “But I don’t know if he’s bigger than Elisabeth. I can’t tell.”

  “He is.” She paused. “But you understand, we’re not just a physical beast. We’re also magical.”

  “I imagine, what with the shape shifting and all.”

  “The size we become as wolves is partly genetic, partly training, and partly determination. Elisabeth is bigger than Lara because Elisabeth as a teenager expected to become the alpha. Lara only worried about being big enough to help protect her family. But they both were very determined as teenagers to be as powerful as they could be, and so they are the most powerful members of the pack. I expected to be in the army special forces, and so I have a different sort of power as a wolf. Karen, too, although she aimed for the army rangers, which is just a little different than special forces.”

  I smiled. “I’m not sure I fully understand, but that just makes you more amazing.” I moved closer and ran my fingers down her wet arm. Portia stood very still while I did it. I shook my head again.

  “What?”

  “I was remembering Eric in the weight room.”

  She laughed. “I’m sorry, I’m not quite that impressive.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to be. God, if I weren’t so gay…”

  She laughed again.