Once he’d sauntered down the driveway, I shut the door, wrapped my arms around myself and squealed quietly before racing to the room to fix my appearance. My hair was mussed, courtesy of Tristan's fingers, so I brushed it out, swiped some mascara on my lashes, and then headed back into the kitchen with my jacket to grab my phone and purse, chanting my grandfather’s mnemonic: Spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch.
I was ready to go, but nervous about meeting his family; nervous and excited about what was happening between Tristan and I. A flush of color spread over my skin as I headed out the door thinking of all the places his hands had gone earlier and the places they had yet to go.
“I found a heartbeat,” he said over the growl of his Ford once I’d joined him where he was leaning casually on his brush guard. “But we have to let it charge for a bit.” His eyebrows wriggled suggestively. “Now it’s just a matter of killing time.”
“We can talk politics? Discuss the state of the nation?”
“Nah, I hate small talk.” Hooking his fingers at my jean pockets he pulled me against him.
I wrapped my arms around his neck, desire pooling where our bodies touched, and stood on the tips of my toes to meet his lips halfway. Yup, tonight was definitely the night!
21
Boobs And Bolognese
The tires chewed at the gravel as Tristan maneuvered his truck off the main road and up along a steep and meandering dirt track. With each stone that disappeared under the tread, I felt my gut tighten anxiously. I caught my knee bouncing and quickly willed it to stop. We each had our little telltale signs of disquiet, though I’d never tell Tristan I’d already figured his out. His thumbnail was, even now, running up and down abstractedly over the stubble beneath his bottom lip. It seemed I knew him better than I thought.
The wall of western hemlocks stood guard along the road like watchful sentries, their branches arching overhead as we passed beneath. The leaves and needles seemed to draw back like an evergreen curtain till finally, Dean’s homestead appeared. It was a massive vintage-looking log edifice with stone foundations, a wraparound porch, and expansive windows. It stood, majestic and shaded, at the center of a primeval garden, overrun with shrubs, stout vines, and more towering trees. Some of the branches had stretched themselves guardedly across the second story gables, jealous of the secrets that lay behind the panes.
On either side of the driveway, lining the gravel, the goatsbeard, hydrangeas, and purple fireweed were left to propagate wildly. The effect was of a quiet rampancy—a hostile smile.
“Welcome to the compound,” said Tristan, breaking the silence at last, unaware of how unwelcome I already felt. And I wasn’t even through the door yet.
“How many people live in Dean’s house?” I knew that Tristan didn’t. He had his own place a little further up the road, although most of the land that lay between here and there belonged to Dean.
“A few people,” he hedged.
“How many is a few?” I looked back up at the sprawling mansion, remarking all the cars and trucks parked haphazardly wherever there was space between the shrubbery.
“Twelve, including Dean.” Tristan pulled his truck into a space under a shaggy cedar, alongside a light blue 1957 Chevy half-ton. When he killed the engine, the silence of the woods fell heavily upon us.
“Excluding you, though.” I mulled that over.
“Right. I live alone.”
I reassessed the ‘commune’ with leery eyes. Unlike what I’d first imagined, there were no barbed-wire fences between the house and the main road. No guard towers either, only a “Trespassers-will-by-mauled-to-death-by-vicious-Alsatians” sign posted near the driveway entrance to warn neighbors and lost tourists off. Secretly, I’d half expected to see groups of demure women in identically drab, nineteenth-century-style blue frocks with white bibs and nun-like headdresses. “How come they all live together like this?”
“ ‘The strength of the pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack’.”
“It takes more than a Kipling quote to distract me from my questions.”
He sighed, leaning back against the headrest. “Not everyone lives in the house all the time. The property is pretty vast and most of the family have their own cabins. James lives in a treehouse near the cove.” He watched me from the tail of his eye. “Think of this as a little town of rogues and misfits that don’t fit in anywhere else.”
“Do they all work for Thorn Aviation?”
“All of us have a role to play, yes.”
“So it’s like mutualism? Everyone strengthens the pack somehow?”
“Not mutualism. Family. There’s a difference.”
Like The Godfather. All of them playing their part in the ‘family business’. Holy shit! What if they were the Alaskan Mafia? A nudist colony of teeth-filing, contact lens-wearing, poodle-eating, bear-whispering, werewolf mafiosi! I almost laughed. My imagination was getting out of control.
“And this house doesn’t just belong to Dean, it belongs to the family. And the family is very territorial, so I apologize in advance if they treat you strangely.”
“Well, I am a stranger,” I murmured, biting my lip as I pulled the door handle.
“It’s just that we feel safe to be ourselves here and—”
“Jeez, Tristan, I get it. It's like you're introducing me to your pack of rescued Rottweilers.” Was I expected to bend over and let them sniff my business end too?
He chuckled, climbing out. “You’re not far off.”
Unamused, I followed him to the gabled deck and up the steps to a solid pair of double doors that were marbled red with vivid cedar knots. “We, who are about to die, salute you,” I muttered.
Tristan gave a light snort as he opened the door to let me precede him into their lair.
The entry hall was spacious, the light muted by a fixture designed to look like a gas lamp. No glassy-eyed trophies here, I thought with relief. Yet. I discarded my boots, following Tristan’s silent example, and then trailed after him down the hallway, my socks padding noiselessly across slate stone tiles. I ran my fingers softly over the varnished live edge of a beautiful end-table that had been pushed flush against the timber wall.
Noticing my appreciative touch, Tristan said, “Tim built that. He helped Dean build the house too.” He then bade me follow him a little further down the hallway, pausing beside a hardwood wolf stretched across the wall. Its body was easily twice the length of mine. Smiling, a hint of pride in his eyes, he said, “Tim carved it, and painted all the landscapes in the house.”
“He probably has people jumping tits over ass for his artwork,” I said reverently.
“He’s quite the famous artist. He does a lot of commissions for the hotels and airports around Alaska.”
I stepped back from the wooden wolf, finally noticing how quiet the house was. “Where is everyone?”
Tristan gave a shrug of his powerful shoulders and continued on down the hallway. “Dunno, probably out running before dinner.” He finally halted at a heavy door and gave a terse knock before he pushed the door open, taking my hand to pull me in behind him. The room was empty.
It was a masculine space, serving as both an office and library, with a heavy walnut desk acting cynosure of the room in the absence of its master. On the wall behind that desk was a peculiar mural. The scene was that of a hunting pack of wolves, but that wasn’t what made it so odd. In the painted expression of each wolf, there was something almost…human. I couldn’t explain it—the effect was so expertly and subtly composed—but it was as though each animal was watching me with a cunning intelligence that was disturbingly unnatural.
“Wait here,” said Tristan, unexpectedly releasing my hand and abandoning me in the middle of the room. Abandoning me to the wolves, so to speak.
Before I’d even opened my mouth to protest he was gone and the door shut behind him. I was too nervous to sit still, the dark wolves stared so keenly that I felt my skin crawl. Instead of sitting there li
ke a waiting lamb I beelined it to the bookshelves, soon realizing that most of the titles were unfamiliar. And old. Some weren’t even in English. I dragged a curious finger across the leather spines, drawing in the wonderful scent of aged leather and old paper. But it was one spine, a faded cream with green lettering that caught my eye first, urging my fingers to pull it from its perch.
The Werewolf by Montague Summers. I held my breath as I carefully turned the front board, chafed and worn. A first edition! My eyes skimmed across the browned pages, glossing over the introduction and settling on the first chapter—Lycanthropy. I slowed my eyes to take in the old words. With a derisive grunt, I read only a little further and then closed the book soundly, rolling my eyes at the idea of war-wolves, witchcraft, and demons. The next book I removed was a weathered volume I did recognize. Metamorphoses by Ovid. The part about King Lycaon seemed to be dog-eared and someone had underlined a passage in Latin that I easily parsed only because there was a line by line translation of the poem. My eyes slid across each Latin word before moving to its English counterpart. Caedis. Slaughter. Sanguine. Blood. I read on: “ ‘His garments pass away into hairs, his arms into legs. He becomes a wolf…’ ” Maybe Dean was a fan of dead poets and Greek Mythology?
With an uneasy glance at the door, I set the book back in its slot beside its neighbor, The Menageries: Quadrupeds. Most of the books in the collection, I noticed, were, in some way or another, related to werewolfery. There were even a few nineteenth century “Wehr-Wolf” penny dreadfuls hiding in amongst the volumes. At first, I’d been amused by Tristan’s innuendos, but I was beginning to feel the first inkling of disquiet. I wanted to believe that Tristan wasn’t some sort of idiosyncratic occultist who believed in this shit, but his filed teeth and the lupine influence rife within the house said otherwise. If he was a lunatic then so was Dean.
I gave a little shiver and backed away from the esoteric shelves just as I heard the door opening with a harsh groan. It wasn’t Tristan in the room with me now but Nicole. Her expression was as cold as marble.
“H-hi.” Well, this was awkward.
“You shouldn’t be in here.” She was looking through me as though addressing the wall at my back.
“I was told to wait here.”
There was a sudden flicker of black in her eyes, something hateful, just before she glanced at the mantle shelf where a clock sat counting the length of the silence that followed. “I’ll let Hamish know you’ll be joining us for dinner,” she finally said in a dead tone. And then she was gone.
My breath expelled with a violent whoosh. I hadn’t known I’d been holding it till the moment she left the room. I hadn’t realized at first just how much she’d chilled the air when she’d entered. I started when the door was opened almost directly after Nicole had disappeared from it.
Tristan blew in like a storm, Dean at his heels. “What did she say to you?”
I felt myself wither under his glower. “That she’d let Hamish know I was staying for dinner.”
He nodded, the clouds dissipating instantly from his face. “Oh.”
Unlike his brother, Dean was grinning humorlessly. “He’s worried Nicole will eat you.” He chuckled at my expression and headed over to sit behind his desk. “How d’you like the old place, Evan?” With a regal flick of his wrist, he motioned me to a leather armchair.
“Very wolfy,” I replied, steeling myself to converse with Tristan’s formidable brother.
He smirked, following my eyes to the large mural of running wolves behind his desk. “It’s in our blood, what can I say.”
“I’m just glad there aren’t any corpse trophies decorating your walls.”
Tristan perched himself on the scroll arm of my chair. “We don’t kill for sport. We eat what we kill, and no part of the animal is wasted.”
“We were hunting venison this morning when you found us,” Dean said, smirking.
“Naked?”
“Like our ancestors.” He laced his fingers behind his neck and leaned back in his chair, lifting his nose as though to sample the air. “Hope you like venison.”
“Oh…um…” I didn’t want to insult the guy by refusing his hospitality, but I wasn’t in the habit of eating anything that couldn’t regrow another limb—or head—never mind a juvenile deer. “I don’t, sorry.” Not sorry.
“Don’t you like deer?” Tristan asked.
“I like Bambi just fine. Preferably alive.”
“No meat at all?” He seemed bemused.
Dean also looked momentarily poleaxed. “That’s okay,” he finally said, “we’ll get Hamish to throw some salmon on the grill or something.”
I groaned inwardly, half amused by their assumption that “no meat” couldn’t possibly include fish.
Dean suddenly cocked his head to listen to something. He then looked up at his brother, and by tacit agreement they stood to leave, Tristan taking my hand in his to pull me up from the plush settee. “Dinner’s ready,” he said.
How could he possibly know that? I looked at the clock. Six o’clock exactly. Maybe they were sticklers for time.
As we neared the dining room, the sound of voices became hushed. The weight of unfamiliar eyes fell heavily on me as I entered the dining room, but at least everyone was fully clothed this time. All the penises were stowed away, and there were no mammaries to agitate my envy.
“Come sit here, Evan.” Nicole patted the seat beside her. “Don’t worry, no one’s gonna bite you just yet.” No smile followed to dull the edge from her odd comment.
“For God’s sake.” With a dirty look at Nicole, Lydia got up from her chair and took the empty seat beside Nicole. Then, smiling, she said, “Take my seat, Evan. That way you can sit next to Tristan.”
“Thank you.” Relieved, I followed Tristan to where the two vacant chairs awaited us.
As far as I could tell, no one seemed to find it strange or uncharacteristic that Tristan was glaring balefully at Nicole.
James appeared at the door the next moment. He grinned and grabbed a spare seat from the wall, dragging it over to scoot between Nicole and Lydia. “Hey, spider girl,” he said, winking at me.
I grinned back at him, glad to have one more welcoming face at the table.
Dean had taken his seat at the head and Tristan the seat opposite him. I was happy to find a reprieve from all the attention when a short man walked in with the last dish. His features were foxlike but friendly as he greeted me.
“This looks amazing, Hamish,” Dean said, reaching for a steak with his fork. “Katie” —he winked at her “my compliments.” The others followed suit, diving in with relish.
I discovered that Sandra, the woman beside me, was a lawyer and that Katie (who I’d seen in the woods this morning) and Hamish were the chefs that took care of feeding everyone as well as preparing the picnics that were offered on some of the tour packages.
On the other side of Sandra sat Ben, a shy-looking biologist, and Ed, the accountant, who looked nothing like my idea of a bookish pen-pusher. Like most of the men there, including Tristan, he was almost a seven-footer. His sleek black skin and winsome smile only complimented his striking face. It belonged on the cover of a book, not shoved diligently between its pages. The man meat I’d spied this morning had, I realized after being introduced to everyone, belonged to Ben, Ed, and Tim, the Tlingit artist. Tim, as it turned out, was short for Timber. He had midnight hair, like Ed, but it was straight as an arrow and lay down his back like a mantle. His skin was a beautiful burnt sienna, stretched across an eagle-like nose, and his eyes were almond brown, seeming to probe every detail around him, as though he saw colors invisible to our naked eyes.
Leanne and Alex were the two IT geniuses (or computer dogsbodies as Alex had put it), and the last person I met was Jack, who worked for the Forest Service in Thorne Bay and looked more like a grizzly than a human. Each person, like Tristan had inferred earlier, really did have an important role here. They had an in-house lawyer, a biologist, a Forest Service
officer, a live-in accountant, tech support, chefs, and pilot/mechanics to operate their fleet of aircraft. It was like a well-oiled machine in one neat little family.
I turned to whisper to Tristan, “I thought you said there were twelve people living here?” Excluding Tristan and I, there were thirteen at the dinner table.
“Nicole—” he lifted his lips off his teeth like a snarl “—is only visiting.” His demeanor inferred he meant trespassing.
“I’d say she’s overstayed it.” James nonchalantly reached for another serving of Bambi’s seared carcass. He looked up and winked at me, but when he swept an amused gaze around the table it was to see the rest of the family, except Tristan, glaring at him. Especially his sister. He shrugged and stuffed his face unrepentantly.
Before Nicole could add a scathing retort (which she looked about ready to do) Katie turned to me and explained, in a voice that overpowered Nicole’s, that the tomatoes in the Bolognese sauce heaped over my plain spaghetti had come from their very own veggie garden. The veal that Dean had ‘procured’ I didn’t touch at all, obviously, but I was no less impressed by their amazing subsistence living.
Tristan’s hand slid over my knee, the heat from his skin surprising me. While Tristan and I were stealing hot looks from one another, James began entertaining the table by playing with his dinner rolls.
“Why did you put nipples on the rolls?” he asked Katie. Then he took a lascivious bite.
“It’s a brioche,” she said, defensively. “They’re supposed to be interesting.”
He eyeballed the remaining two rolls on his plate. “Great, our first dinner with Evan and you feed her boobs and bolognese.”
“Stop playing with your boobs, James.” Dean tore a piece of veal off his fork, his cinnamon eyes impassive.
After dinner, Tristan pulled me aside as everyone was clearing the table. “Do you want me to take you home, or are you up for an adventure?”
“An adventure,” I answered in a husky voice that didn’t sound like it belonged to me.
Thorne Bay Page 17