by Viola Rivard
Now that he knew what she was, he could discern the differences in her scent. He'd been so absorbed in the appeal of her scent that he'd failed to notice the subtle undertones that were distinctly inhuman.
They were becoming more pronounced.
After they'd slept together, he'd noticed that her scent had changed, but he'd assumed it was just some trace of his own scent rubbing off on her. Now, he wondered if it was her wolf coming closer to the surface. It would make sense, as his own wolf had become more insistent since he'd met her. Was it possible that they were calling to one another?
Thirteen years.
Harper's nightmares had begun when she was thirteen, which meant that her wolf had been repressed for just as many years. Having spent so much time in darkness and isolation, what would she be like when she finally emerged?
Shan had no way of knowing. He had shifted within two months of having his first nightmare. Aside from the first tumultuous year and the past week, he and his wolf had always had a symbiotic relationship and a mutual respect.
For his father, it had been the same. Hannes and his wolf lived in something close to harmony. In spite of his assertion that the wolf was separate from him, they had been so in tune with one another that Hannes seldom needed to shift. He'd let his wolf out at least once a month to stretch its legs. The rest of the time, his wolf was content to allow his human to guide them.
For his mother Shara, it was quite the opposite. She'd been twenty when she'd completed her first shift, and had promptly snapped, killing her pack and the male who had been her mate. In the years that followed, even after Hannes had helped to temper her violent nature, she'd still been quick to shift whenever she felt threatened. Shan could still remember his father preemptively hiding her pelt before arguments. For all her pride in what she was, his mother's wolf was just another force that sought to control her.
He wondered now if her lack of unity with her wolf form was due to the years spent repressing it, or if the instability was a result of the trauma she'd endured in her youth. Now more than ever, he wished he had a better understanding of his kind.
As his thoughts on the matter grew unproductive, he redirected his focus back to Harper.
Or was it Snow?
Just like her scent, now that he knew who she was, he felt foolish for not realizing it sooner. He was well acquainted with the Halcyon wolves. He saw them every year, towards the middle of the circuit. It had been just this past September that he'd last seen Alder, the male she claimed was her father. Shan still had a difficult time coming to terms with that, given that Alder was barely two years older than him. It was difficult to compare their scents without having Alder close by, but it was easy enough to pull up an image of the Halcyon alpha and there was a resemblance between he and Snow, particularly in the eyes.
She should have told him what she was. Wanting to hide her identity from her friends was no excuse. They'd had ample time alone together when she could have told him the truth. He'd known she'd had secrets, but these were the sort that could have affected his pack. While Halcyon were his allies, her brother's pack was anything but. Had he not gotten to her before they'd taken her, she could have easily disseminated sensitive information to one of his last remaining rivals.
Under any other circumstances her deception would have been grounds for removal from his pack. Instead, she was now indispensable to him.
Shan was not one to indulge in superstition or a cosmic order to things, but he didn't know how else to explain Harper's appearance into his life.
All he knew for certain was that he had to make her shift, and soon.
Harper woke to find herself alone in bed, her arm throbbing and her head feeling as if it'd gain five pounds. With some effort she managed to sit up, the bed linens falling down onto her lap. Her torso was bare, and a peek under the blankets revealed that she'd been completely stripped.
The room was lit by the light of a single candle. She vaguely remembered waking earlier with Shan at her side, but there had also been a kindergartener tending to her wounds, so she wasn't entirely sure she hadn't been dreaming.
There was some sort of stew at her bedside. It sat on a tree stump that had been fashioned into a nightstand, beside a neatly folded outfit. She regarded the food and the clothes with equal indifference.
Something about being back in a den had revived her aversion to clothes. Over the years spent among humans, she'd become rather fashion forward, in spite of spending her childhood primarily in the nude. Around the age of twelve, she'd developed something of a resentment for clothes as Sarah had begun insisting she wear them whenever she wasn't in her room. This rule seemed to apply only to her, and only because she was developing much more quickly than even her older cousins.
She played with the idea of walking around naked, but ultimately put the clothes on. In spite of her upbringing, she didn't think she'd be able to resist covering her nude breasts in front of strangers.
She noticed that her ankle had been bound and remembered injuring it when she fell from the tree, so she was careful not to put her full weight onto it when she stood. It was good that she hadn't, because even moving at a hobbling gait from the bed to the door was grueling. She hovered in the doorway for a moment, debating whether or not to return to bed. Hoping that the pain would lessen with some use, she pressed on, feeling her way down the corridor.
Harper had been five when her pack had realized that she lacked a shifter's nocturnal vision. Up until then, they'd just assumed she was clumsy and overly attached to her adopted mother Sarah. While she had been very fond of Sarah, it had been the light she'd been drawn to. Although they changed dens frequently and often went without even the most basic necessities in those early years, her uncle had always made certain to keep light in his mate's life.
As with all of her limitations, her cousins had instantly sought to exploit it. Lotus had waited until the night of the new moon, and then taken Harper out to play just before sunset. As soon as night had fallen, they were accosted by a rival wolf pack. Harper had spent an hour hiding in a hollowed tree trunk and listening to Lotus being slowly tortured and killed. Then, the wolf had turned its attention to Harper, chasing her from one side of the tree trunk to the other while she screamed and cried. The nightmare had come to an end when Caim had found them and revealed her “attacker” to be her other cousin, Sable.
Caim couldn't always be there for her, and so she'd had to learn tricks to compensate for her lack of sight, particularly in the dark and often perilous passageways of a cavernous den. She paid close attention to the air currents, knowing that if she walked against them she'd be led to an opening. When she wasn't running her hands along the wall, she could clap her hands or whistle to find the boundaries of the cavern. Most important, she always made sure one foot was on solid ground before lifting the next.
With a combination of all of her tricks, she made her way down to the more illuminated lower level. She could tell that the den had been inhabited for a long time because the walls and floors were free of rough edges and someone had taken the time to craft stairs in between the levels of the den. By the time she reached the bottom, sweat had broken out over her skin, mostly from the pain of walking on her ankle.
She found Shan almost immediately, and just as quickly wished that she hadn't. He was in a wide open room that looked to be some sort of hybrid lounge area and dining room. There were several long, unoccupied tables and a separate area with two large chairs beside a fireplace. It struck Harper how odd it was to see a den so thoroughly furnished, but the awareness was secondary to the sight of Shan leaning back in one of the chairs, a half-naked female on either side of him.
A redheaded female sat near to Shan's feet, forcing a smile as she watched the other female, a dark haired twenty-something, engage Shan in conversation. Her breasts were at eye-level with Shan and her hand alternated between the armrest of the chair and the side of Shan's bicep as she spoke.
Harper came to a sickening
realization.
Shan is...hot.
Of course, she knew he was sexy as fuck. It was quite literally the first thing she'd noticed about him. But, he was also scary. Between his staggering size, his tattoos, and the natural arch of his brows that made him look perpetually angry, Harper had kind of assumed that most women would find him intimidating to the point of unapproachability. After all, there had been no females fawning over him back when they were with his pack, at least not that she'd seen.
In the ten seconds before they noticed her, Harper saw the female touch Shan exactly four times. Her thoughts zipped around in a fucked up loop as she struggled to process a sudden influx of possessive fury.
Shan wasn't Harper's mate. But he wanted to be her mate. But she had told him that he wouldn't be her mate. But now this female was touching him, and she should know better, because Shan belonged to Harper. Except, he didn't. Shan wasn't her mate. But he wanted to be her mate. So why the fuck was he letting this bitch touch him?
Harper must have been throwing off some major heat, because at the sight of her the female's hand dropped and she took a full step back from Shan, their conversation abruptly halting.
Shan must have known she was there from the start, but he took his time in shifting his attention. Once he did look at her, he appeared more annoyed than pleased by her arrival. He stood and walked to her, his eyes narrowed.
“You shouldn't be up walking, yet.”
He placed a hand on the side of her face, and in spite of her upset, she leaned into his touch.
“I'm all right,” she said, though she doubted he'd be fooled. “Where are we at?”
“Tower Hill, remember?”
Harper did recall something like that. As she nodded, she put a hand on his arm, partly for balance and partly so that she was touching him.
She made a show of looking around the room, her eyes drifting past the two females. “Where are Viper and the others?”
She remembered seeing them at the river, closing in on her and her brother, but after Caim's departure Shan had dismissed them. Everything that happened following them leaving the river was a blur and she didn't recall seeing Shan's pack mates again.
“We took a different route than them,” Shan said. “They're still on their way to The Steppes.”
He began to lead her towards the chair, but when he took note of her limp he grabbed her beneath her rear and lifted her into his arms, carrying her the rest of the way. When he sat her down, she saw that his pelt was draped over the back of the chair. She wasted no time in pulling it over herself, enjoying its preternatural warmth and the implication it sent to the other females in the room.
Shan introduced them, but Harper refused to give their names any space in her head. Then he mentioned that one of them, the redhead, was going to be taking her measurements. Apparently, he was going to have them sent ahead to The Steppes so that she'd have clothes waiting for her when they arrived.
“Aren't we only a couple of days away, though?” she asked.
“Yes, but we won't be returning yet.”
Harper drew her legs up onto the chair and tucked them beneath the pelt. “Where are we going?”
Shan flicked his wrist, as though brushing off her question.
“Did you eat your breakfast?” he asked.
“Not yet,” she grudgingly replied.
He instructed one of the females to get her something to eat, and then said, “Eat and then have your measurements taken. We'll leave once you're ready.”
Shan settled down in the chair across from her, his gaze remote and fixed on the hearth. Insecurity pricked at Harper, like a thousand tiny needles. He had touched her face, carried her, and allowed her to cover herself with his pelt, but there was still a palpable distance between them.
She had breached his trust, and she had no idea how to fix things. In the past, whenever she'd fucked up this badly in a relationship, she'd just ended things and cut contact. With Shan, that wasn't going to be an option. She couldn't leave things as they were and she wasn't even sure she could leave Shan, period. She wasn't entirely sure what was happening between them, but it was something serious, something that couldn't be ended by a mere falling out.
Once her measurements had been taken and she'd forced down a passable amount of food, Harper saw the resident healer a final time. The bandages on her arm were changed and she was instructed to stay off her ankle for at least a week. Harper knew from experience that shifters tended to overestimate the amount of time it took humans to heal, so she mentally gave herself two days before she was back up and fully mobile.
Their departure was slow. As they were on their way out, the den's inhabitants were returning from a hunt and Shan stopped to talked to every single one of them. There were at least two dozen wolves and he seemed to know all of their names, as well as minor details about their lives. He introduced her to each of them, not as his mate-to-be, but simply as Harper. She told herself that this was a good thing, but each time she could feel the needles being driven deeper into her skin.
It was late morning when they arrived outside and Harper got her first look at the den. The entrance was situated at the base of a tall rock formation the shape of which reminded her of a lighthouse. Tall fir trees with drooping branches were clustered in the immediate vicinity, blocking her view of what lay beyond the small clearing.
Several of the wolves had followed them outside and had gathered by the entrance to watch Shan take his wolf form. He set Harper down near to the others and then unwrapped his pelt from around her. Once he'd moved some distance away, the pelt fused to his skin and his body began to expand.
In the span of a minute, his body filled the clearing. The completion of his shift was met with applause and cheers from the onlooking crowd. Harper felt just as giddy, though not just from seeing a man take the form of a colossal wolf. As soon as he came fully into himself, the wolf's attention was fixed solely on Harper. He took a step towards her and lowered his head, at first sniffing her and then rubbing the side of his snout against her. Gentle though he was, he nearly knocked her over. After a moment of reacquainting himself with her, the wolf opened his mouth and closed it around her torso.
Harper experienced a moment of panic that didn't quite subside when she realized that the wolf wasn't trying to eat her. With all the finesse and care of a mother alligator carrying her babies in her mouth, the wolf lifted Harper up and deposited her onto his back. She came down in his soft mane of fur and to the sound of more cheering. The wolf took another minute to make sure that she was secure and to lick her, and then they were departing.
As they traveled, the trees gave way to rolling fields for a time, and when they entered the forest again, the trees were mostly deciduous. The cold nights had turned the leaves to shades of red, orange, yellow, and gold, and Harper enjoyed taking it all in just as much as she enjoyed riding on Shan's back.
She had officially come to the conclusion that his wolf had a mind of its own, and it was a mind that seemed to hold Harper in pretty high regard. He made frequent stops to check on her and was prompt in helping her down when she told him she had to pee. At one point, he stopped just so that he could twist his big head around and nuzzle her. When he looked at her, there was no wall between them. It was the same raw affection Shan had held for her, before he'd found out she'd been deceiving him.
When they stopped, Harper half hoped that he would remain in his wolf form. It was late afternoon and she could easily picture herself cuddling up in the space between the wolf's legs and falling asleep swathed in his warmth and tenderness.
As soon as she was placed on the ground, he began to shift. With her back to him, she listened to the sounds of joints and bones popping as they reconfigured themselves into Shan's human form.
While he shifted, she looked around at the area where they'd stopped. She could see the opening of a rock shelter in the craggy hill in front of her, and beyond the trees to her left, sunlight reflecting off a large bod
y of water.
She felt Shan behind her a moment before he lifted her up into his arms. The expression he regarded her with was neither affectionate nor hostile, but cool and bordering on indifference. She'd much rather he were angry.
“Are we staying here for the night?” she asked as he carried her towards the shelter.
It seemed a little strange that they were stopping so soon. It was getting late, but they'd only been traveling for a few hours and she doubted he was already tired enough to sleep.
“We're staying here for however long it takes you to shift.”
Harper looked around again, her face scrunching. “What? You can't be serious. We don't even know if I can shift, and you want to waste days out here, away from your pack?”
His lips curved into a humorless smile. “We are going to stay here all winter, if that's what it takes.”
Chapter 2
There wasn't much to the inside of the shelter. A hollow in a red stone rock formation, its ceiling was low enough that even Harper had to duck as she hobbled inside the opening that made up nearly a whole side of the “room”. The floor was made of packed dirt and there was a fire pit in the center of the space that contained nothing but ashes.
If Shan had planned on bringing her here, it didn't show. There were no food supplies that she could see, no chopped firewood, not even a fur for bedding.
He sat down on the far side of the room, stretching his long legs and resting his back against the wall. Harper remained standing, her arms folded across her chest. Her ankle hurt like hell, but sitting down felt like relenting and she wasn't prepared to give in to this bullshit.
She did recognize that he had her at a massive disadvantage. She had no clue where they were and an ankle that was liable to give out before she got twenty paces in any direction. There was also the fact that even if she could walk, he could drag her back as many times as he wanted to, like she was a toddler being put on the time-out stool.