by Vivian Arend
“Bastard,” she muttered.
Chase grinned, enjoying how much he’d been smiling since he met Shelley. “Don’t wipe with poison ivy.”
“I’m going to—”
Her mocking response was lost under the snarl of an animal. Chase twirled and raced toward her, vibrating with adrenaline.
Mere seconds had passed, yet she was already on her back with a full-grown puma on top of her. Chase fought the spontaneous urge to shift that rolled over him. He screamed, the cougar shriek escaping from his human vocal cords nearly as terrifying as the real thing.
Shelley called out as well, her insistent no, no, no echoing off the nearby tree line. Chase’s heartbeat pounded in his ears, dimming the volume of her cries as he focused on the big cat.
He shifted one hand to cougar, claws at the ready, and swiped it over the beast’s shoulder in a wound eerily reminiscent of his own injury. The cat lifted its head and snarled, but otherwise didn’t budge from where it loomed over Shelley. Muscles flexed as it lifted a paw, head twisting back toward his prey. There was that sense of other about the creature—and recognition and horror slammed simultaneously into Chase.
It was a shifter attacking Shelley.
A second later the animal roared, this time in pain, not fury. Its body jerked once, then again, blood spurting out to coat the ground, Shelley, Chase’s shoes.
He snatched at the animal’s shaking body, the knowledge it was a man inside this beast forced down as his concern for Shelley washed away all hesitation. He made ready to reach around and slit the cat’s throat with his claws. Only the creature wasn’t mauling her anymore, it was quivering slightly as it lay draped like a thick skin rug.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Chase, oh my God, help me.”
Shelley’s shouts were the only thing that kept him in human form. He grabbed the heavy beast and dragged it aside, ignoring the horrible agony that ripped through his shoulder as he manhandled two hundred pounds of puma to the ground.
Her face was streaked with tears, and there was blood everywhere. It only took a glance to double-check that the puma was dead. The animal’s limbs still twitched, but it was the long open wound across its neck and a very familiar knife handle protruding from its chest that caught Chase’s eye.
He dropped to his knees and gathered Shelley close, looking for claw wounds, for bite marks.
“Chase, I killed him. I didn’t mean to, but he just—”
“Did he bite you? Cut you? Tell me.”
She lifted her arm in the air and held it out for inspection. There were a couple slashes in her skin, deep enough she’d need stitches. “Shit.”
“Grab hold of your arm and squeeze. We need to get you bandaged before you bleed into trouble.”
“I killed him. Killed a shifter.” Her voice trembled.
Chase carried her back to the trail. She dropped her head on his shoulder and all the fight went out of her, and he was damn sure she’d fainted. Only when he lowered her to the ground, she dragged herself upright and leaned against the pack.
Tears marked their tracks on her face through the dirt and dust. He wiped one cheek tenderly. “You killed him because you had to.”
Shelley hesitated. “I didn’t want to. Oh God, what have I done?”
Chase cupped her chin in his hand and locked their gazes together. “He attacked. You responded. Nothing more—there was no ill intent on your part.”
“I could have—”
“Could have what?” Chase refused to let her start second-guessing. “He attacked you, Shell. It wasn’t a conversation where you could consider your responses. Instinct kicked in and you defended yourself, and that’s what you’re supposed to do. Accept it.”
She nodded slowly, her fingers clenched tight around her arm. He stroked her cheek, willing her to accept the truth. The back of his neck tingled as he attempted to stay alert to the dangers around them even as he gave her the attention she needed.
She breathed around the pain. She was afraid, but she wasn’t going to pass out.
And when she spoke, he couldn’t have been any prouder—the strong, capable woman he’d come to know shining through as he expected. “Get my red medical kit out of the backpack. And…I need you to get my knife.”
He nodded and rose to his feet, all senses on high.
He’d recognized the puma. The shifter was a sometimes partner with the man who’d initially clawed him. Chase grabbed the medical supplies for Shelley then made his way to the body to recover her knife.
Chase stared down at the body, another jolt of admiration hitting alongside sorrow at the shifter’s death. She’d done exactly what she said she could. The slice to the throat should have been enough to warn off an opponent—it wasn’t that cut that killed the man. It was the perfectly executed thrust that had stopped the puma’s heart cold.
Chase needed two hands to pull her blade free.
He cleaned the knife, watching the bushes, staying vigilant for any further disturbances. By the time he returned to Shelley’s side, she’d wiggled out of her shirt and wiped most of the blood from her torso. She’d single-handedly gotten out a needle and thread, and was preparing to stitch herself together.
He laid a hand on her shoulder and kissed her temple. “Let me do that. Did you take a painkiller?”
She nodded. “Numbed the area I need to stitch.”
He grabbed the water bottle lying at her side and picked up the remains of her bloody shirt. The one she’d obviously been using to clean herself up.
Shelley protested as he dabbed the cloth over her skin. “You have to stand look-out in case there are any more mad men out there. Last thing we need is to be caught with our pants down.”
There was so much wisdom in her words, and so much anguish in his heart for putting her into this situation in the first place. That she was joking about it didn’t reduce his guilt.
“I can watch and help.”
It took time. Him pulling off her bloody pants, washing her clean and helping her dress. All the while she clutched her arm, the cloth he’d torn from his shirt staunching the wound.
The instant she was clothed, she dropped to the ground and applied the needle to her arm. Chase had done a lot of bleeding in his life, but never sewed himself up. Offering to help didn’t seem the right thing to do—not with her clearly in control. He pressed her cleaned and closed knife against her thigh. She glanced from her bloody task to grimace then nod.
Chase stood and eyed their surroundings, wondering where Mark was. If ever they needed their backup, it was now. “Do you have something to take for when the freezing wears off?”
“Once I’m done. I need a clear head to make sure I’m doing this right.”
The thought anyone had considered this woman worthy of being tormented made his blood boil. “I’m going to shift. Check out—”
“No.”
Her shouted denial of his plan stopped him in the middle of removing his shirt. “No?”
She shook her head. “Don’t change. I need you…” Shelley swallowed hard and continued stitching, her voice amazingly level. Controlled, as if she’d reached deep inside and flipped a switch. “I need you human. I need to be able to talk to you, and I need you to not go anywhere. If that’s crazy and selfish, then so be it. Please?”
Crazy, maybe. Selfish? He’d never call it that. “I’ll wait until Mark arrives. Let me know when you need help.”
In the end, she let him complete the final stitches once she discovered she couldn’t cut the thread left-handed. Instead, she kept lookout as he wiped her clean and applied a bandage. Followed her directions and found the bottle of painkillers so she could swallow a couple pills.
He arranged their packs as if he were circling the wagons. Made sure she had her knife. Then he pulled her into his lap and held her as they waited for Mark to find them.
Part Three
This is the Law of the Yukon,
that only the Strong shall thrive;
&n
bsp; That surely the Weak shall perish,
and only the Fit survive.
Dissolute, damned and despairful,
crippled and palsied and slain,
This is the Will of the Yukon,—
Lo, how she makes it plain!
“The Law of the Yukon”—Robert Service
Chapter Sixteen
The puma was dead.
Not the one she’d personally sent to his grave, but the one they were looking for.
It had taken at least thirty minutes before Mark found them, his pulled-back lips revealing razor-sharp teeth as he prowled the perimeter before returning to their side.
The wild-looking creature gently bumped her arm, offering comfort. Her world whirled as someone who she barely knew, who was on the more likely to rip off a hand than shake it list, gave her tender attention.
Misfits and outcasts they might be, but damn the men of the Keno bush had soul. She wasn’t going to forget that.
And she was going to do whatever she could to help their leader.
Mark led them unerringly past the still body of the shifter she’d killed, guiding them into a clearing not far away. A small rustic lean-to, barely standing, teetered where the sunshine met the shadows. Rachel’s cabin had been a luxury resort compared to this.
The broken door half-hanging off its hinges was the first indicator something was dreadfully wrong. The second was the smell, which shifter senses brought to a high-pitch gag-level before they stepped within throwing distance of the hovel.
The third and most obvious proof was the naked body sprawled just inside the doorframe.
Chase touched the body with a toe, ready to roll the corpse over when she stopped him.
“No. Don’t. Not without gloves.”
Chase gave her a look she recognized too well.
“Look, Mr. Indestructible, humour me.”
He shrugged. “Not as if I can catch anything from him I ain’t already got.”
A shiver shook her from head to toe. She barely contained it, forcing herself to pull on a mask and protective gloves. After being stomped on by a crazed puma, she had reached the breaking point. “Great, so why don’t you just give him a cuddle, and when we bury him you can crawl into the pit at his side.” She snapped out a spare set of gloves, ignoring Chase’s expression as she waved them in his face.
If he wanted to be nonchalant about what they’d found, fine. She wouldn’t be a wimp and fall apart. She was more than ready to poke back.
Chase followed her directions. He pulled on the gloves, grabbed the man’s arm and carefully tugged.
Rigour mortis had set in, and the entire body rotated as if the shifter had turned to stone. An eerie and horrible statue designed by Picasso on one of his less lucid days.
It wasn’t the body of man they gazed down on. It wasn’t a puma. The shifter had died in the middle of a change, arms and legs not quite human, not quite animal. Shelley took a deep breath through her mouth, swallowing hard to stop the bile from rising.
She’d seen death before. She could cut and slice and stitch and repair the bodies of both forms. But this was worse than trying to stitch together flesh that had been torn apart in a fight.
It just wasn’t right, in all the ways that a person could possibly be wrong.
She took a peek at the man’s face, needing clues to his death. If he’d been in pain, if it had come upon him unaware.
His face was worse than the rest of him, that mixture of man and beast creating something out of a horror novel, and she totally understood how the stories of terrifying werewolves and Sasquatch could have developed. If anyone from vet school had seen something like this on an autopsy slab, they would have been convinced that the world of the gothic nightmare existed.
“Shelley.”
Chase gazed at her, his nonchalance from earlier gone, replaced by concern. She shook herself alert. “I’m okay.”
“I know you are. But I want to get out of here as soon as possible. Mark is standing lookout, but I don’t want to camp anywhere near this site.”
She nodded and braced herself, stepping forward to begin to gather the samples she needed. “Will we hike back to your cabin tonight?”
“Partway.”
“I can walk. I’m tired, but I can go for a while.”
He hummed noncommittally. “How’s your arm feel?”
“How’s your shoulder?” she snapped back.
Chase snorted. “Woman, you are so not good at the do everything you’re told thing.”
Carrying on a conversation made it easier to ignore exactly what she was doing to the body in front of her. “You’d have been bored. Admit it.”
“I would have been completely bored,” he drawled.
Shelley slipped samples into a small hard-covered case and broke the vial inside the cooling pack. She squished the chemicals together until the reaction began, turning the container into a miniaturized refrigerated carrying case for the tissue and blood samples.
She rose and stepped away from the shifter, managing at the last to see him inside the twisted layers. “Poor fellow. I’m sorry we couldn’t talk to him, though. Find out where he’d been, what he’d been exposed to. If only…”
Chase came to her side and turned her away from the sight. “I’m going to take care of the body. You rest for a minute. We’ll be hiking shortly.”
She didn’t waste energy arguing. She sat on the rock he led her to. Glanced around to see Mark patrolling the area, his nose visibly twitching even at a distance. Then she closed her eyes for a moment and breathed out slowly.
There was something horrible happening, and she still had no idea how to save Chase. The puma who’d attacked her? Chase had said the man was a partner with the horribly malformed man.
If she did the basic logic equation that meant whatever the dead man had succumbed to was contagious, potentially deadly, and both Chase and she had been exposed.
A loud crash brought her gaze back up to where Chase worked, piling combustibles over the body. He methodically cleared a space around the collapsed lean-to, separating the wilderness from his stack. Then he lit a corner and stepped back.
Flames licked inward in a slow trickle, swallowing the wood and leaves. The thick white clusters of old man’s moss clinging to the branches sparkled as it was consumed. Chase watched intently, his body strong and straight as he stood vigil.
Shelley wanted to go to him, but this wasn’t the place. There wasn’t any time. But Chase’s expression? It looked as if he was considering his own funeral pyre.
In all his years of living in the bush, he’d never faced this before. Ahead of him Shelley was barely keeping herself vertical as he pushed her to walk one more section of the return trail before allowing them to collapse in exhaustion.
It wasn’t the smartest of moves—with potential dangers growing around them, he should have bunkered down and found a place to rest that was defensible. But the fear running through his veins motivated him far more than he wanted to admit.
There was death in the wilderness, and this time it was calling his name.
The thought of dying wasn’t what kept him walking the uneven path. The bright sky lit their way—the midnight trail was daylight clear. And the same clarity filled his mind. His arm was weaker than before, pain radiating out and stealing his strength at times.
He’d seen what had happened to the men. The loss of their humanity, the change into monstrous beasts.
If he’d been alone he would have turned and headed north, retreating as far into the bush as possible. He would have dug a pit or found an abandoned mine. Ended his life to protect others from whatever it was that had him in its grip.
Shelley stumbled, and he raced forward to steady her. She pressed off his assistance and resumed her mindless march, nothing but sheer determination keeping her going.
If he’d been alone he would have done all sorts of things differently, but he wasn’t alone.
Shelley.
; Injured and the only person who had a chance of finding a solution to whatever was happening.
The rumors Delton and the others had shared were true. The men had known. Had listened to the voices on the wind and from the wild creatures that cried out that disease and death were coming. He’d already been marked, but damn if he wouldn’t see Shelley safely back to civilization where she’d have a chance at a cure.
She stopped, feet coming together as she rested a hand on the nearest tree. “Chase? Break. Please.”
He surrounded her and leaned her head on his shoulder. “Soon. This spot is too contained. Five more minutes and we should be at a clearing.”
She nodded, her fingers finding his arm and squeezing for a moment. “You’re a harsh taskmaster.”
“I know, a slave driver. Pirate. Why do you think they call me Silver?”
Her laugh, weary as it was, lightened his step. “I’m going to offer to walk the plank in a few minutes, just keep that in mind.”
“You’re too damn tough to make that offer, Shelley. Now come on, tell me what you’d really do if you were on a pirate ship?”
They’d resumed walking. Slower, but still covering distance. “I’d probably get sick. Can’t stand the motion.”
Her confession surprised a tired snort from him. “Really?”
“Even canoes do it to me. You should have seen Johnny the first time he tried to take me fishing.”
“Your dad?”
“Yeah. Poor man. I spent the entire trip with my head hanging over the side. I swear I was green.”
He kept her talking about good times—and they were all about family. Chase caught himself smiling as she shared another tale. She really was a healer. As he listened to her smooth voice, the tight knot of pain inside that had threatened to drive him to his knees eased.
For this woman? He could hold on and accomplish great things.
Time passed in a blur. Chase finally brought them to a halt and set up camp. Shelley collapsed still fully clothed onto their hastily assembled bed. Mark prowled the area around the tent, constantly sniffing the air, his bristled nose wiggling and twitching.