by Lucy Lyons
The coyotes started their song again as I sat staring into the fire, willing it to burn the pain off my memories so I could focus on connecting to my mate and searching her out, but the scent of wolves hit me the same time the coyote’s song changed to a warning. I’d made sure to make myself welcome in their territory, and the coyotes had visited me and then let me be. The wolves who had arrived made no such effort, and from the scent coming toward me, they didn’t much care about hiding their presence either.
With a curse, I dumped my bucket of dirt on the fire, dousing it, and grabbed my duffel out of the tent, leaving the rest of my gear behind. There was no time to break it down, and the wolves would smell me all over it, so I couldn’t hide it or pretend to be human and hide in it. I shoved my wallet back in my pocket and took off at a lope toward the nearest main road, praying that I’d find a generous traveler in the middle of the night.
Bright headlights rounded the corner and I waved my arms at the semi, hoping the driver would pull over but not believing I’d catch a ride so quickly. The truck slowed and pulled over, and the passenger window rolled down far enough for me to peer inside as I balanced on the sidestep and clung to the mirror.
“Please help me, man, I was camping alone and lost my tent. I have my wallet but don’t have much cash. How far will sixty bucks get me?”
The greybeard chuckled and the door unlocked with a soft electric snick. “You buy me breakfast in Moab and we’ll call it good. I can take you as far as Salt Lake City, if you’re headed north after that.”
I sighed in relief and buckled up, my duffel bag at my feet. “I’m headed to Seattle, but I should be able to find my bank in Salt Lake and get the money for a ticket there.”
“You really were camping then?” The guy asked and then held out his left hand across his body. “I’m Leroy.”
“Yeah, I was out a couple of miles, looking for some solitude, but . . .” I chuckled and shrugged. “I’m Orson.” I shook his hand and he nodded and settled into his seat again and slowly pulled back onto the highway.
“I don’t make a habit of stopping for strangers, but when moved upon by the spirit, as my wife always says, you’d better listen.” I nodded and glanced out the window, looking for shining wolf eyes in the darkness.
“Well, sir, I’m grateful for your attunement to the spirit then, because I don’t carry much more than a hunting knife for cutting twigs and my dinner, and what I heard singing in the darkness wasn’t going to wait for me to start a bonfire.”
Leroy didn’t answer, just nodded, his forehead furrowed. “Well now, you should know in these parts, there’s always been whispers of supernatural creatures out in the desert, vampires and whatnot. Not that I believe all that,” he added with a chuckle, “but when you’re all alone out there, you have to wonder if alone is what you really are.” He shot me a cheeky grin. “I’m used to sleeping in the day and being awake all night. Go ahead and catch a nap if you’re blood pressure’s back to normal, I’ll keep the radio low.”
I took it to be an end to the conversation, and even though I knew I couldn’t sleep, I nodded and leaned against the door with my bag as a pillow and shut my eyes. I listened to old bluegrass for a few minutes, and another dream started, but this time, I was sure I was still awake, as I listened to Leroy hum along with a song I recognized from an old movie.
The redhead had her back to me again, but in this dream, she was looking out a window in a room I’d never been in. The walls were light, roughhewn pine, and the furniture was the same, all handmade by the look of it, and very well-crafted. The curtains were some sort of Native American print, all red and black and white like the pillows and the seats of the chairs I walked past as I moved toward her.
My arms encircled her waist and she sighed, leaning back against me as I tucked my face into her neck. Even in my dream state, I could almost smell her musk and my body tightened both in the vision and in the truck, and bolted upright with a start.
“You OK? Dreaming of coyotes?” Leroy chuckled.
“Uh, wolves, actually,” I laughed and scrubbed my face with my hands.
“Noble creatures, for all that bloodthirstiness you hear about in stories,” he replied. “My uncle had a wolf-dog, you know, one-a those hybrid types,” he added. “Best, most loyal creature I’d ever seen.”
“You weren’t afraid of him?” I asked, turning to face him and leaning back against the duffle bag that shuddered and jangled a little with the shaking of the truck cab.
“Nah. He saved my uncle’s life. But Uncle Charlie was forced to put him down after, because that old wolf-dog tore the throat out of the guy who broke into their house and shot my uncle.”
“Yeah, it’s always the same. Kill the loyal dog . . .” I didn’t finish my sentence, but my thoughts were back in Baton Rouge with my pack. I’d been sentenced without a trial, in fact, without a crime, after giving all my loyalty to my people and to Thaddeus. He had no children of his own, and when my parents had died, he’d taken me aside and told me I would be his successor someday.
But the more my power grew, the more time he spent talking about the day I’d eventually challenge him. No matter how many times I swore to him he had my allegiance until the day he died, or that I would fight by his side and be his champion when his teeth fell out and he was too weak to hunt, his suspicion and paranoia grew. I’d never been grateful for Porter’s disability before I’d had to run, but it kept him safe from challenges and from the swirling of paranoia that infected everything Thaddeus did as the pack younglings reached adulthood.
I thought about home as miles of dark road stretched out before the headlights of the big Kenmore truck and lulled me into a true sleep, and thankfully I didn’t dream. The jerk of the truck as Leroy parked, and the sudden quiet as he turned it off after all that rumbling and sighing woke me, and I shook myself as I tried to remember where I was.
“Moab diner is going to have the best breakfast, and then we’ll head over to the Gas-n-Go where they have showers, if you want. Nobody around here will much notice the smell of campfire, though,” he shrugged. “Kind of the normal in these parts.”
Gratefully I accepted and made good on my promise to put food in Leroy’s stomach, and added cash to his fill-up at the truck stop after. In return, I got enough steak and eggs to even slake my preternatural appetite, and made the waitress smile with a ten-dollar tip for keeping my coffee full and bringing me extra hash browns when the overflowing plate of breakfast didn’t fill me up the first time.
With the truck filled up and vacuumed out, me no longer smelling like a vagrant, and some extra snacks purchased, we hit the road again, and by the time we reached Salt Lake in the early afternoon, Leroy had told me all about his wife and their daughter, and his pride and joy, his baby granddaughter, Danielle. He pulled down his visor and pulled down a handful of pictures of the little beauty with the black natural curls and giant, round brown eyes.
“She’s perfect,” I smiled, and he nodded. His face was serious, chest puffed out with pride.
“I’m man enough to admit I had some wrong ideas about her daddy when he and my Lorelei met.” He huffed out an impatient breath, aimed, it seemed, at himself. “I was a racist old fool, and if it hadn’t been for my wife’s cool head and patience, I might not have come around in time to see exactly how perfect she is,” he confessed. “Just because people are different don’t make them bad.” He squinted at me. “I got a feeling you already know that, though.
“I have been around a lot of, uh, different folk down my way,” I chuckled, thinking of the divisions even in my pack, between city types, college-educated wolves like myself and after he was done with high school, Porter, and the swamp-educated bayou folk like Skoll and Thaddeus. Both had their merits and added to the pack, but sometimes, those different points of view came to blows before they found a middle ground.
“Well, where I came from, people who looked like Dwayne, my son-in-law, well, they didn’t stick around long enough t
o learn that they were good people. I learned a lot of bad things that I had to unlearn really quick or lose that little beauty.”
The baby smiled up at her grandfather fin the picture, her chubby brown fingers curled in his beard. “Looks like you did the right thing, Leroy.” He hummed happily with the country music on his radio and tapped the steering wheel as I shuffled through the pictures. Despite all the places he’d been, every picture in the stack was of his family, including his son-in-law, who smiled out with his arm around a lovely young woman I figured had to be Lorelei, holding his doctorate diploma in front of them, still wearing his cap and gown.
The pictures went back in their special place over the windshield and we sat in silence the remainder of the drive. Leroy was no doubt thinking of his family, and I was certainly thinking of mine. I dug my phone out of my duffle and turned it on, hoping for a text or a missed call from Porter, but the only call had come from Thaddeus, and I didn’t want to listen to the message until I was alone.
I texted my brother a short message, letting him know I’d scented wolves on the way, but I was nearly to my next destination. I wanted to tell him about Leroy’s kindness, but something held me back and I shut the phone off and buried it in my clothes again.
When Leroy and I parted in Salt Lake City, he wished me luck and I wished him safe travels, trying to ignore the niggling doubt that itched at the back of my skull. I scented the air at the train station, but all I smelled were the vagrants who made the area their home and the trains and travelers.
Still, I watched out the window for a long time after my Amtrak had left the station for the Washington coast, a stone in the pit of my stomach and the uncomfortable burn of eyes between my shoulder blades for a hundred miles of iron tracks.
CHAPTER THREE
Seattle was exactly as alien as I expected, at least to my eyes and nose. But there was a familiarity there that surprised me too. I hadn’t dreamed of the gorgeous redhead at all during the two-day ride, but that was mostly because the closer I got to the ocean, the less I was able to close my eyes. It was the smell of the ocean that first caught me off guard, still salty and fishy and thick with the tang of decomposing kelp and soggy driftwood. Everything I smelled in it should’ve been exactly like the Atlantic, but it made me feel like I was on an entirely different planet.
There was ceiling of soft grey clouds over the city that brought the sky almost within reach as they brushed over the tops of the high rises and dipped down over the harbor. People rushed through the city with their noses in their phones faster than I’d seen gossips in the garden district running to a drunken barbeque brawl. Yet no one even bumped shoulders as they passed, a ballet to the music of the city’s white noise that I had obviously not learned. I bumped and darted through the people wondering if my choice of water travel over air had been a good idea.
I followed my nose all the way down the winding streets to the docks and a busy shopping strip called Pikes Place Market, where I watched fish mongers throw their wares to the delight of passersby and wondered where I was supposed to go next. I sat on the edge of the water and tried to quiet my mind, listen to my wolf, but the lack of sleep and my own brand of werewolf paranoia was shorting all my mental fuses.
I hung my head, almost dozing off from sheer exhaustion, when another scent brought me wide awake and to attention. I jumped up from the concrete and spun around, tracing the wolf musk and perfume as the breeze wafted it past me and out into the harbor. Walking up the hill I glimpsed a flash of red hair and picked up my pace, loping after her as my heart raced and the beast within finally woke up from its stubborn silence, urging me forward. It was the only prompt I needed to know that somehow, I’d stumbled onto the woman I’d been seeking in the very moment I felt the most hopeless about how to find her.
I almost stopped tailing her when she passed a warehouse that smelled like magic and children instead of machinery, but she turned a corner and I sped up to a jog, just in time to see her laughing with a big guy at the door to a nightclub as he let her in. I glanced at the late afternoon sun and sniffed the air again. The sense of magic I’d gotten from the warehouse was heavy around the building that housed the club, and as I got closer, I smelled wolves and other foreign, dangerous creatures I couldn’t identify but rose my hackles all the same.
The club wasn’t open until evening, so I loitered at the building across the street, afraid if I took my eyes off the door for a second that she’d disappear again, maybe forever. It took an eternity for the sun to set, but as the twilight sky darkened, the early drinkers started to file in the door, let in by the same mammoth guy, but now he was wearing a too-small black t-shirt that stretched tight over his broad barrel chest and the grin he’d had for my dream girl had been replaced with a scowl as he scanned ID cards and let customers in, in two and threes.
I crossed the street as some hipsters approached and blended in with the group after stashing my bag under the wooden steps of the old building across the street. Not that I was desperate to keep anything in it. I had my phone, my wallet, and a few bucks left over from the truck stop for the cover charge and maybe a drink to nurse while I waited for a chance to talk to the future Ms. Right without looking like a stalker creep.
The magic got stronger around the building and it made my skin crawl as I huddled as close to the beards in their beanies and North Face jackets as I could without them noticing. I couldn’t have explained why I was trying so hard to blend in, except for the building unease I was getting from the power that emanated from that place. If it hadn’t been for the woman I’d followed to the club, I never would’ve gotten as close as I had, let alone tried to get in. I envied the humans who I watched flooding in the doors like cattle to a slaughterhouse eve n as I was terrified for them, and myself.
The breeze was at my back, which didn’t help matters. I pushed my wolf down as deep as I could and wrapped myself in the protection my mother had taught me, thinking human, normal, beneath notice, until the hum of magic around me matched the hum in my head and I prayed that it would be enough for whatever was inside to pass over me without noticing.
It never occurred to me that the reason I didn’t recognize the magic, was because what I was feeling had been driven out of my part of the country long before Anne Rice wrote her famous novels. But when the bouncer nodded me through the door without looking at me I was funneled through a coat check and, to my horror, a silver cross checking station, where a beautiful woman with glowing skin and red eyes collected them and tagged them. She was covered from fingertip to elbow in long evening gloves, accepting the crosses from chagrined girls and tough guys whose eyes were tinged with dread as they handed over the one bit of protection they had from a monster I hadn’t realized still existed.
The woman in my dreams, a werewolf, had gone into a building that made my skin crawl with death. Not clean, honorable death, but the cloying scent of death that had been cheated, the decay slowed so that the circle of life could never be completed. Vampires were the scourge of my beloved Louisiana before America had become a state, when there were only the Indigenous people to prey upon.
Now, humans flocked to them, mesmerized by the strobe lights and heavy bass on the dancefloor. I had to hand it to the sick bastards for their ingenuity. Instead of hunting their prey, they somehow had convinced their prey not only to run straight to their own doom but to pay for the privilege.
I glared at the vampire behind the bars of the cage that supposedly protected people’s valuables and her eyes lit up with the grin that split her face. She put a walkie talkie to her lips and spoke, and I tried to turn around and push my way through the crush of humans that had backed up behind me in the bottleneck of the club’s interior entry.
Before I made it more than a few feet a giant hand clamped down on my shoulder and broke my threadbare control on my wolf. I spun around, snarling, and came face to face with a set of ice blue wolf eyes in a scowling face as the bouncer dragged me off to one side.
&n
bsp; “I don’t know who you are, but we like a little warning before visiting alphas arrive,” he hissed in my ear, pressing me against the wall.
“I didn’t know I’d find a pack in the city,” I stammered, too shocked to find werewolves still enslaved by vampires to argue.
He nodded and clapped me on the shoulder. “Hey, as long as you aren’t here for trouble, you’re an honored guest.” He pulled me by the hand, my shoulder still in his grip, but to the humans, it had to look like a friendly, if overbearing, gesture.
“I was going to take a boat. I have to find my mate,” I began, hoping I would get through whatever power the vampires had over the werewolf to make him understand he should be on my side. “She came in here, and . . .” I broke off and forced myself out of his grip. “My pack will come and free you. Just let me go, let me make a call.”
“Free me?” his face showed only confusion as he opened the door ahead of us. “I’m free as a bird, man. My name’s Steven, but around here most people call me Bull.”
“As in bull shitter, in case you were wondering,” came a soft, feminine voice behind me, and I spun, horrified that I’d let the club and Steven overwhelm me enough to miss her approach. “Oh, hey, I’m sorry. We do so much dampening of preternatural power in this place, it can be a little hard to find your sea-legs, so to speak.” She was a pretty, petite brunette, with an aura of magic that brightened the room and made my wolf fight to get closer to her.
“You aren’t a werewolf,” I said, and she laughed.