Wolf Pack

by Bridget Essex

  “Well, while I get this fire going,” I tell her, feeling my cheeks flush as I regard her with a smile, “why don't you dig through my suitcase, see if there's something in there that you think will fit you.”

  She nods, lifting my suitcase up from the floor like it weighs nothing, and she sets it down on the cot closest to her. The cot sags beneath the weight of the suitcase. I...really don't pack light.

  Shannon zips the bag open, and I go back to wadding up crumpled newspaper until I'm satisfied with the nest of it that I've put in the stove. I slide in a few small pieces of kindling, and I strike a long match against the box, delighting in the warm glow as I place the tiny flame against the newspaper in the stove. It immediately alights, and I blow out the match, feeding more kindling to the little fire.

  I can hear Shannon rummaging around in the suitcase, but the crackling fire absorbs my attention, until I'm absolutely certain that it's not going to go out. Then I stand up, brushing off my knees as I close the stove door. I turn around.

  “Um...” I murmur, licking my lips. “Wow.”

  Shannon has swept her hair up into a messy bun using one of my hair ties, and she's wearing a bit of the jewelry I brought (Yes, I brought jewelry for camping. No, it wasn't intentional. I hadn't unpacked my small jewelry case from my last work trip two weeks ago, and I still had it packed away in the zippered top of my suitcase). She's wearing a black choker, dripping with little black gems, some bracelets and black earrings that twinkle in the soft lights from overhead. She's also wearing a gray tank top that shows off her muscled (and tanned, I realize now) shoulders clearly. The super sexy effect should stop there, because she's also wearing my black fleece pajama bottoms that are covered in small orange jack-o-lanterns... And, somehow, they look sexy on her.

  “Wow,” I repeat, licking my lips again and crossing the space between us. “You look...”

  She glances down at the pajama bottoms and laughs. It's the first laugh I've heard her make, and I feel myself breathing out, relaxing, as I listen to that gorgeous sound, that warm, low peal of laughter.

  “Ridiculous?” she asks me, one brow up, her hands on her hips as she flicks her gaze to me. “I hope you don't mind,” she says, lifting up her arms, the bracelets clacking, “but I wanted to get dolled up. This moment is...special,” she says, tilting her head.

  And then she turns around and lifts the bottle of red wine out of the suitcase with a teasing smile, swinging it from her fingers, a questioning brow raised.

  I brought beer, because of course you bring beer camping. But I love wine, and I'd picked up this bottle of red last year and never had a chance to drink it. I thought this trip would be as good a time as any. It's sad that I considered a camping trip the highlight of my year, the time to bring out the good vintage...but there it is.

  “I only brought one glass,” I tell her apologetically, fishing around in the suitcase for the glass I packed, nestled it in one of my hoodies so that there was no possibility of it getting broken.

  “I can drink out of the bottle,” she tells me softly, but I shake my head, adamant.

  “What, are we animals?” I tell her, shaking my head again, flashing her a small smile. “Nonsense. We can share the glass.” I hold it up.

  Her mouth twitches at the corners again, but she nods as I bring the corkscrew up and out of the depths of the suitcase; then I open the bottle of wine.

  “I'm not a wine snob or anything,” I tell her, as I pour the red liquid into the glass, “which is why I'm not letting it breathe.”

  She's grinning as I hand her the glass. “I don't believe in waiting,” she says, and when I glance at her, surprised at the tone in her voice, her eyes are dark as she watches at me.

  “I...do,” I tell her with a gulp, but then I take a deep breath and grin at her. “I'm not usually a fast mover,” I murmur, setting the open bottle down on the little table next to the bed.

  Her smile is pure sex as her eyes rake me over, up and down, and then she cocks her head. She brings the glass of wine up to her nose. “Smells great,” she says, swirling the contents gently with her wrist as she turns away from me, moving slowly, her hips swaying.

  Shannon sinks down on the ancient coach in the corner then, crossing her legs elegantly and putting her arm up along the back of the couch as she gazes at me, one brow raised in question. “Won't you join me, Abby?” she says, the words a soft, sensual growl as she swirls her glass again, watching me.

  I'm trying my best not to overthink this, but as I cross the space between us, as I sit down on the creaking couch beside her, my back poker stiff, I wonder what's happening to me.

  Because as I looked at her across the room, my heart skipped a beat. A flush of color sprang up in my cheeks. Desire roared through me.

  But there was something more, something beyond all that physical stuff.

  There was an ache in my heart as I looked at her. A good ache. The kind of ache you feel when something broken is on the mend.

  Shannon brings the glass up to her lips and closes her eyes. I watch her as she tilts her head back just a little, her full lips closing over the rim of the glass. She takes the tiniest of sips and savors the wine in her mouth for a moment before swallowing. Then she opens those sparkling golden eyes and holds the glass out to me, giving me her small, secret smile.

  “Savor it,” she whispers, her fingers brushing against mine as I reach out and touch her hand and grasp the glass.

  Savor it. I don't think she's talking about the wine.

  “I...will,” I say softly. She removes her hand, uncrosses her legs slowly, calculatingly...sexily. And then she recrosses them, all the while gazing into my eyes.

  I take a sip of the wine, and I'm pleased with how it tastes. Mellow and smoky, with a hint of vanilla and blackberry. Very nice, very subtle. I reach out, setting the glass down on the little, broken wood coffee table that has served this cabin as long as I've been alive (Mom said she garbage-picked it back in the sixties).

  And then I turn and look at Shannon.

  And I don't say anything. She said to savor this. So that's exactly what I do as I lean forward, the crouch creaking (very unsexily, I might add) beneath me. I lean close to her, and I linger, my face an inch or so from her own.

  I can smell the wine on her breath, can smell the pine in her hair as she smiles at me, as she wraps her arms around me, bringing me close. She brushes her hot mouth against my own, and then she kisses me with a fervor that you'd think all of our antics in the shower would have wiped out—but no. She's even more passionate, if that's possible, when she kisses me now, her tongue moving, insistent, her teeth nibbling my lower lip, everything as slow and lovely as a dance. And when she traces kisses across my cheek, down my chin, down my neck, I gasp out against her. She teases me with her tongue and teeth, sucking the skin a little. I think she just gave me a hickey.

  “You don't know,” she murmurs against me, drawing me even closer to her, “how long I've waited for this, for you...”

  And that's when there comes a knock at the door.

  Beside me, Shannon lets out a long, low sigh, her entire body stiffening as she stops kissing me, sitting upright, her mouth wet. She turns, glancing at the front door. “No,” she murmurs, and when she glances back at me, her eyes are so pain-filled that my heart aches instantaneously, just to see her like that.

  “What's wrong?” I whisper, reaching out to touch her, but she's shaking her head, sitting straighter on the couch.

  “It's...too late,” she murmurs, running her hand through her hair. Then she looks at me, really looks at me, uncrossing her legs, leaning forward, placing a gentle, warm hand on either side of my face, holding me. “Abby,” she says then, her golden gaze boring into mine, her tone fast, soft, urgent. “No matter what she says to you, you have to believe me, okay? You have to—”

  “Abby?” comes a woman's voice, loud and menacing, from the other side of the door. “Are you in there with someone? You might be in danger. Open
this door immediately.”

  The flat way she's speaking, the loud, almost yelling tone, the brusqueness...

  It's Barbara at the door, I realize, paling.

  I hold Shannon's gaze, but then I break away, standing, crossing the room quickly. For a long moment, my hand hovers over the doorknob, but then I take a deep breath, and I unlock the door. I open it just an inch, peering out into the night.

  Barbara.

  “Hi,” I tell her shortly. “What's going on?”

  She's standing on the porch with a flashlight, and she shines it into my eyes. I couldn't see if she had anything else on her person—there are rumors that the park rangers possess guns for bear control, and I thought I saw her holding a shotgun in her hand—but I can't see anything now that I'm blinded from the flashlight.

  “Abby, are you in there with someone?” she asks, and she's trying to make her voice sound comforting, I can tell, but it's just really coming across as sickly sweet, cloying, and absolutely, one hundred percent fake.

  “What's it to you, Barbara?” I ask her carefully, trying to keep my voice light, but it really doesn't come out sounding like that. The flashlight beam goes out of my eyes, and she sighs for a long moment.

  “Abby, it's for your own good if you tell me if you're in there with a strange woman. You would have found her naked, possibly wounded, curly brown hair, tall, lanky. She's on the run, and she's dangerous.”

  For a very long moment, I'm completely unsure of what to do. But then I startle, because there's a warm, gentle hand on my shoulder.

  “She already knows I'm here, Abby,” says Shannon, her voice low. “It's all right.”

  I step back, opening the door a little, and across the threshold, tension crackles as Barbara and Shannon stare at one another. Shannon's shoulders are rolled back, and she has her arms crossed in front of her. Barbara just looks shocked to see her.

  “How could you have healed it that quickly?” she mutters, narrowing her eyes in suspicion as she stares at Shannon's bare, healthy shoulder.

  “What...what's going on here?” I ask, my voice high because I'm honestly a little scared right now—I have no idea what's going on—but I soldier through that flicker of fear, anyway. “Barbara, what's this all about?” I ask her, my voice sharp now, cutting as I ball my hands into fists. “What makes you think you have any right to—”

  But Barbara shakes her head, cutting me off as she steps forward, placing her hand aggressively around Shannon's forearm. “You're coming with me,” she snarls, “and we're going to finish what we started.”

  “No,” says Shannon tiredly as she looks at Barbara, her lips up and over her teeth. “You're going to cheat and get everything you want. Because you are a coward,” she murmurs, almost as an afterthought, but I can see how hard Barbara is gripping Shannon's forearm. Barbara twists it sharply at that moment, but Shannon makes absolutely no sound, still staring at Barbara with hate in her eyes.

  “Hey, you can't just barge in here,” I start, and I move toward Barbara, but in that moment, she turns her angry stare on me.

  And I stop in my tracks.

  Her eyes...they honestly look like she's fevered. Like she's not, in this moment, in her right mind.

  She's terrifying.

  “No matter what happens, Abby, you have to stay in the cabin,” Shannon tells me softly, her words pleading. “Please don't come out. I want you to be safe. You have to stay safe.”

  And then Barbara moves backward, her fingernails still gripping Shannon's arm, and Shannon follows her out onto the porch, pulling the door shut behind her.

  I don't even think, and just as instantly, my hand is on the doorknob, and I'm opening it, rushing out onto the porch, glancing around wildly, looking for the two women.

  But Barbara and Shannon are nowhere to be seen.

  “What...” I whisper, glancing down.

  There are two piles of clothes on the porch. One is a park ranger uniform, with a hat and unlit flashlight resting next to it. The other pile consists of jack-o-lantern PJ bottoms, a gray tank top and my jewelry.

  I gasp, crouching down, picking up one of the bangle bracelets and staring at it, still warm from lying against Shannon's skin. I'm half-disbelieving, half not-really-wanting-to-believe what I'm seeing with my own two eyes. How is this possible? One moment I was on the other side of the door, and the next I was out here. There is no way that they could have slipped out of their clothes and disappeared so quickly, and here might be the most pressing question:

  Why in the world would they want to take their clothes off, in the first place?

  Feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand up, I scoop Barbara's flashlight from the porch floor and flick it on, shining it into the woods on either side of the porch. There's nothing but pine trees and fallen branches and a carpet of leaves, stretching out into the scary-looking woods.

  There's nothing, no one, at all.

  For a long, cold moment, I stand there, gripping the flashlight, listening to myself breathing, listening to the absurd quiet of the woods that swallowed two full-grown women whole. There is absolutely nothing moving out among the trees, and not a single sound. It's like they just vanished.

  But I grip the flashlight, listen as hard as I can to the quiet of the woods around me, and that's when I hear it, out in the forest to my right...

  A...growl. A deep, low, savage growl that reverberates through the trees.

  My body reacts instantly. I leap off of the porch, and with the flashlight beam bouncing off the tree trunks, I'm dashing into the woods, following the sound.

  Running in the woods at night is no small feat, and really, really not a fun thing. Small branches keep slapping my face with bright pain, even though I duck beneath as many as I can, and they get tangled in my hair mercilessly. There are branches strewn all over the forest floor, and I leap over as many as I can, but one that I don't see trips me up, and I go crashing to the earth, my hands softening my fall (and delivering some pretty nasty brush-burns to my palms).

  The flashlight is knocked wildly out of my hand and is lying now, still lit, next to the trunk of a big oak, the beam illuminating some weeds that move to and fro in the light. A small, chill wind is blowing through the woods now.

  I groan a little, rubbing at my palms, and I sit very still for a long moment, listening. But the woods are quiet again. I hear the soft shush of the wind in the tree branches around me, causing the hair at the back of my neck to stand on end. I rise gingerly, picking up the flashlight, and I stand motionless, trying to choose a direction. When I turn my flashlight beam toward the forest clearing ahead of me...

  I stop, the breath knocked out of my lungs.

  Because something impossible is happening in the center of that clearing.

  There are two wolves there, and they are fighting each other viciously. It takes me a moment to make sense of that fact, trying to hold my flashlight as steadily as I can in my hand, because I realize, right now, I'm shaking. The two wolves in the clearing are rolling end over end, snarling and growling and biting and snapping. My flashlight beam catches them as they perform a particularly epic flip, one wolf getting shoved out of the clearing, its paws skidding in the earth as it rights itself very close to me.

  This wolf has dark brown fur, mottled in black.

  It looks...familiar.

  I stare at it for a long moment, my eyes going wider as I realize that this is the wolf I thought I saw in the bathroom. But how is that possible?

  How is this possible?

  I don't get time to think about it or even to react to the fact that a wolf just came so close to me. The wolf gets up, rising quickly to its four paws, and shakes itself off, its ruff bouncing to and fro. And then it glances in my direction.

  I flash the beam of light into its eyes, and for a long moment, we remain frozen in place, the wolf looking into the light, and me staring back, eyes narrowed. And then I sit down quickly on the ground, the strength leaving my legs as I crumple, as I g
aze into the golden eyes set in that wolf's face.

  I'm not staring into wolf eyes.

  I'm looking at human eyes.

  Eyes I've seen before.

  Panic roars through me. Because...no. It can't be. Can't be...but...

  If you asked me what I think I see...

  This is so crazy.

  But the wolf has Shannon's eyes.

  It's not possible. I know, absolutely, that this isn't possible.

  The wolf shakes itself again, lifting its face to the air, its nose wrinkling, sniffing. I watch it leap back into the center of the meadow, bounding toward the much bigger wolf, with its much bigger teeth, and in that moment, I'm compelled to step closer, to aim my flashlight beam on the two wolves who are standing off from each other, circling one another, hackles up, snarling as they pace.

  This other wolf is huge. The first wolf, the one that came close to me, stands as tall as my hips. But this other animal? Its shoulders are as tall as my shoulders. I feel like a broken record at this point, but I have to reiterate: how is that even possible? The wolf is a typical gray color, but everything about it is a little off, a little wrong: its rippling muscles, its massive height and very large, pointy teeth make it much more imposing than the smaller wolf. And it seems to know this, as it snarls fearlessly, lunging for the smaller wolf.

  I shouldn't be here, watching this. I should be running away as fast as I can, back toward the cabin. I should be trying to find Barbara and Shannon.

  But that wolf's eyes...

  Okay. It's been a very strange night. I could have never predicted or expected any of this. And I know this sounds crazy, and I couldn't tell you exactly why...but I'm utterly compelled to watch this fight...

  Well. That's not exactly true.

  I'm utterly compelled to root for the smaller wolf.

  At first, I try to explain it away: people always root for the underdog (or, you know, underwolf, as the case may be). But the plain, cold truth is that I shouldn't be rooting for either of them. I should be terrified, running away in abject fear.

  But for some weird reason...I'm not.