by Vonna Harper
The brothers exchanged another of their intimate glances. As they did, Mato experienced a prickle of awareness at the back of his neck. He could be wrong, but he couldn’t help wondering if Smokey was watching them. If so, she’d think they were talking about her, but she was wrong—at least right now. She was sleek sex, energy, and heat, more ethereal than real to him right now, and he desperately wanted to keep her that way.
“For many years he didn’t,” Uncle Tal said. “But when he knew he was dying, he called his sons to his side.”
Despite the sun’s warmth, Mato became chilled as the two men took turns telling him what they knew. Grandfather had gotten drunk right after Cougar Spirit had come to him with his desperate plea for justice, but when he’d sobered up, he’d turned himself over to his spirit, who’d mentally taken him deep into the mountains so he’d understand. Man and cougar had stood over the abandoned body of a murdered doe and heard her orphaned twins’ plaintive bleating. Less than a mile away lay another slaughtered deer. This one, a buck, had had his antlers cut off. A long, bloody trail stood as proof of how far the wounded buck had stumbled before it had died. In all, five deer had lost their lives, their carcasses left to rot.
The hunter responsible had pitched a campsite near a creek. When Grandfather first saw him, the unshaven man had been passed out, drunk, but he’d revived and had set about cleaning his rifle. His trophies, the antlers, were tied to a handmade sled the man intended to haul out with him, but there was still room on it. Too many bullets, food, and other supplies remained in his tent.
“He was alone?” Mato asked, speaking for the first time since they’d begun.
His father nodded. “Cougar Spirit told your grandfather that this man’s wife had recently left him, and he’d lost his job. He’d always hunted, but never like this. Nothing mattered to him except hunting and drinking until he stopped hurting.”
In some respects, Mato felt sorry for the man, but nothing justified the slaughter. “What did Grandfather do?”
After more exchanged looks, Uncle Tal took over. Grandfather had been taken, unarmed, into the mountains by his spirit, and although a lifetime of physical labor had made him strong, he hadn’t wanted to risk his life against an armed man. He also wasn’t sure he could kill a killer.
But Cougar Spirit had taken matters out of Grandfather’s hands by turning a human being into a predator.
Disbelief gave way to acceptance as Mato listened to what a long-dead man had told his sons about the transformation. When Grandfather had told his spirit that, as horrified as he was, he wasn’t a killer, Cougar Spirit had backed Grandfather against a tree, rose up on his hind legs, and planted his massive paws on Grandfather’s shoulders. The powerful mouth with its deadly teeth had opened, and those teeth had closed in on Grandfather’s neck.
But instead of feeling death penetrate his flesh, Grandfather began to change. Human muscles grew larger and more powerful. His skull had thickened, spine elongated. Arms and legs had morphed into limbs made for primal strength and survival. Most telling: he’d stopped thinking like a human. As hair coated his flesh, he’d dropped onto four legs and grown a heavy tail. His senses had sharpened. His mind became simple: live or die, kill or be killed.
And the beast he’d become relived the deaths of those innocent deer.
Running down the shrieking hunter and tearing out his throat had been easy.
“Grandfather said he felt no shame or guilt when the killing was done and he became a man again,” a now pale-faced Uncle Tal said. “The whole time he was returning to Storm Bay and his family, pride rode with him, and he embraced the gratitude of those dead deer. But then he stepped into his home and looked at his wife and children and knew he could never tell them what he’d done. His spirit had turned him into an animal, a killer, and might again. He became afraid of himself and even more afraid of his spirit.”
His mind spinning, Mato stared at his own hands. They’d always been his tools, vital parts of him. Because of them he’d maintained his land and built a house, taken incredible photographs of nature’s wildlife. And they’d held a woman’s body against his equally vulnerable one.
But if Spirit wanted—
Unable to complete the thought, he lifted his head. His father was looking at him with a mix of love and pity. In contrast, Uncle Tal was staring at their surroundings. The longer he studied his uncle, the more certain he became that he knew why he stared.
“You,” he barely muttered. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
Still focused on something unfathomable, Uncle Tal nodded. Reaching out, Mato squeezed his uncle’s hand. Uncle Tal’s spirit was a wolf, another predator.
“Tell me.” He forced the words. “Did your spirit do to you what Grandfather’s did to him?”
“It’s better if only I know. Safer for everyone.”
“Maybe before, but not now.” He indicated his house. “She’s here because of that man.”
“Flann Castetter.” His father made the name sound like a curse.
Mato felt feathers brush his cheeks and then the sensation died, leaving him convinced his spirit had just sent him a message—or a warning. As awed as he was by the contact, he’d give everything to have Spirit leave him alone so he could bury his mind and body in the woman, the dangerous woman, inside the home he’d built. A wave of empathy for what his grandfather had lived with weakened him, but along with that came chilling awareness of how much darker his own journey might be.
Forcing raw courage into every molecule of his being, he again squeezed his uncle’s hand. “I have to know.”
Shutting his eyes, Uncle Tal nodded. “I was afraid I’d have to say these words, which is why it was so difficult for me to come here, but because I love you as if you were my son, I did.”
“I embrace your courage.”
“I’m not the one who needs courage. You are.”
Incapable of speaking, he rubbed his uncle’s dry fingers.
Sighing, the older man began. “Our spirits are more than givers of wisdom, more than stewards of this beloved land. Their power—their ability to force us to obey their commands…”
“By turning us into them,” Mato finished for the slumping man he loved as much as his father.
“Tal,” his father said, “I don’t want you to become like our father, filled with a burden that eventually killed him.”
“I have no choice.” Uncle Tal opened his eyes. “Our father told us about becoming a cougar so he could prepare us for what might happen, and now I must do the same for my nephew.”
Although surrounded by a sense of unreality, Mato knew what his uncle was going to say, maybe not the details, but the essence. “Is Castetter dead?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“How?”
Even the breeze seemed to stop so it could listen to a tale of forces beyond most humans’ comprehension. As Uncle Tal told it, he had been content to listen as Flann Castetter presented the design for NewDirections Development. Yes, he’d sensed his spirit’s uneasy stirring, but because Castetter was talking about something far in the future that hadn’t been approved, he hadn’t seen the connection between those plans and a poacher’s violent death at his father’s fangs. But beginning the night of the first public meeting, he’d been beset with nightmares in which massive houses ate up acre after acre of sacred land.
Tal had heard chainsaws biting into ancient trees, seen the Spruce River’s course changed and fragile banks dug up by massive earthmoving equipment. Mud and debris fouled crystalline water, while squirrels and birds dislodged from their homes in the trees threw their plaintive cries into the air. Soil enriched by centuries of pine needles was buried under concrete, fences put an end to ancient deer trails, and emissions clogged the air and compromised the lungs of what creatures still lived there.
“My wolf spirit insisted he be stopped before the damage could begin,” Uncle Tal muttered. “It must not be as it had been back when too many deer lost their lives befor
e justice was served.”
Deer weren’t the only example of why spirit justice was meted out, but he sensed his relatives didn’t know much more than he did about which ancestor had killed a wolf poacher, the bear who’d stopped two rogue timber fallers, a greedy salmon fisherman whose drowned body had been found near his kill, or the careless camper whose too-large fire had started a devastating blaze more than twenty years ago. That man’s remains had stood in silent testament to yet another cougar’s strength.
Like his father had tried to do, Uncle Tal had warned his spirit that his human heart rendered him incapable of killing, but Wolf Spirit had taken matters out of his hands two nights after the last so-called informational meeting. Castetter had been on his way back to Portland to confer with his fellow investors, when he’d stopped at the rest stop just north of Wolf Bay.
Uncle Tal had been waiting for him, but not in human form. Because it was night, Castetter had had the area to himself, or so he’d believed. He’d been using his flashlight to guide him along the gravel path to the bathroom when a wolf suddenly blocked his way.
“I was thinking, and yet I wasn’t,” Uncle Tal explained. “I’d never felt more powerful, and my eyesight was keen. I smelled the man’s fear and heard his heartbeat. The moment he screamed, nothing else mattered. I would silence him using the weapons my spirit had given me. He tried to run, but I knocked him to the ground. When he curled up, covering his head with his hands, I bit the back of his neck. Screaming, he turned over and struck with the flashlight until my jaws broke his wrist. Wanting him to know he was going to die, I straddled him, his face and my muzzle inches apart. Our breaths came together. Even with his right hand flopping, he tried to gouge out my eyes, so I sank my teeth into his throat.”
Just as your father, my grandfather, had done years ago.
Uncle Tal’s eyes closed, and he started shaking. “The taste of his blood made me hungry to end things, but something stopped me. Holding on to him, I let him bleed. For a long time.”
Oh, god, oh, god!
“Then?” Mato prompted when silence went on too long.
“Then I killed him. And dragged him deep into the woods.”
Where Castetter’s body remained. “It’s a public place,” he finally thought to say. “No one said anything about finding blood.”
“Because it started raining that night and rained all the next day. When I came back to myself, when I became a man again, I was lying under a tree with my clothing soaked, shivering.”
And now you’re shivering again. With that thought, Mato wrapped his arms around the frail-feeling man and held him close. But even with everything he’d heard and learned in the past few minutes, he couldn’t help thinking about another body and another kind of trembling.
21
“Where are you going?”
Looking as remote as he had when he’d come in a few minutes ago, Mato sat on the side of the bed lacing up his hiking boots. Smokey had been afraid to say anything when he’d first come inside, and that fear remained with her, pushing aside her need to be in his arms.
She hadn’t told him she’d spotted him talking to his relatives, concluding that he’d guessed that. Whatever the reason for his distance, it had a great deal, if not everything, to do with that conversation.
Why did things have to be so complicated between them? she wondered, though she already knew the answer. If they’d met under other, innocent circumstances, would they have immediately been drawn to each other? Maybe there wouldn’t have been a spark, let alone that fire in her belly. Not being attracted to him seemed impossible, especially because the dark and dangerous nature that now kept her at arm’s length was part of his appeal. Maybe his mysterious complexity was the draw—that and the understanding that he was more than just a man.
He stood, causing her to step back. What had she just called him—dark? Yes, he was that and more, as if additional layers had been added to him, maybe at birth. She’d never been drawn to moody-broody men, preferring those who were as optimistic as she believed herself to be, and yet here she was living with the ultimate in sober.
Living with? Hardly. And yet she was no longer his prisoner.
Tense, she watched him head toward the front door. He’d curled his fingers around the knob before she spoke. “I might not be here when you return. Have you thought about that?”
“I’ll find you.”
Of course you will. Nothing can stop you if you put your mind to it. “What if I decide to leave town?”
“You won’t.” He still wasn’t facing her. “You have your damnable article to write.”
So that’s what his mood was about—at least part of the reason. Although she longed to haul him around so he had to look at her, she didn’t because she didn’t know what she might say. And she wasn’t going to touch him, because it would undoubtedly lead to insane sex, and that would get in the way of what they needed to deal with.
He had to walk. Walk and think, but not about her.
The woods closed around him, sheltering him as they had his entire life, and even with what he’d learned about Castetter’s death, a measure of peace settled around him. If he moved away he could earn a great deal more money, even become wealthy, but not only didn’t he give a damn about material things beyond his home, his soul started to shrivel the moment he put distance between himself and Storm Bay. Like the rest of his family and the majority of his people, this was the only place where he belonged.
Because the spirits had spun powerful spells around them.
“I know you’re watching me,” he told Spirit. “And I know you heard—and already knew—what my father and uncle told me. I knew he was dead. I’d suspected someone had killed him the moment he disappeared. He deserved…”
Did a man deserve to lose his life because of his career? He couldn’t answer that any more than he could condone what his uncle’s spirit had compelled him to do.
Unwilling to draw parallels between himself and his uncle, he allowed himself to be distracted by a mouse watching from the end of a fallen tree. If a mouse was his spirit, he’d never wonder what in the way of violence might be expected of him, but neither could a mouse protect this land.
After a brief smile at the tiny gray rodent, he continued walking toward the Spirit’s Overlook, where he’d gone so many times. He’d first started coming there about the time his body began changing from a boy’s to a young man’s, and although every step was familiar, it never ceased to rejuvenate him. Even today, knowing what he had to do, the journey felt right.
Where are you going? Smokey Powers had asked him, but his only words to her had been spoken in anger, and yet he wasn’t angry at her—or at himself.
It was the world he lived in, the forces surrounding him, commitment. And yet he couldn’t reject those things, because without them he’d be left with nothing except a sense of failure.
When he reached the cliff, he noted that clouds were building on the horizon, which often served to announce that a storm was coming this way. Maybe it was fitting that it started raining as it had the night he’d first seen Smokey Powers.
Smokey. It seemed as if he’d known her forever, and yet what he felt for her was starkly new. He wanted her body with a savage intensity that deeply shook him and had a great deal to do with why he’d left her so abruptly.
She could be gone when he returned, he acknowledged, lifting his arms to the heavens. Why would she want to stay in a house where she’d been held prisoner waiting for a man like him?
Freedom. She’d want that.
Just as he did.
Not that it mattered.
Speak to me, my spirit. Don’t make me beg for your wisdom. Even if I long to reject your words, I must hear what you have to say. Just as other spirits directed those who carry my blood, I have to listen—just don’t command me to kill her!
His head feeling about to explode, he nevertheless stretched his arms even farther. Invisible wings again brushed his cheeks, maki
ng him wonder if Spirit was acknowledging the tears he didn’t dare shed. His uncle hadn’t wanted to kill, and yet he had because his spirit had given him no choice by turning him into a wolf. Living with the knowledge of what he’d become and what he’d done while in that form had nearly destroyed his grandfather.
If he jumped off the cliff—
Don’t, Mato. That isn’t your destiny.
“Then what is?” he demanded of the internal voice he both dreaded and craved.
To defend what’s sacred.
“That’s what others have done. But she—she isn’t jeopardizing the mountains. She has no saws, no guns.”
You know what her words are capable of.
He did, damn it. That was the hell of it. If she put everything together, and he had no doubt she was capable of it, she would be even more dangerous than a poacher or developer because her words would expose centuries-old secrets.
“Maybe it’s time for the truth to be known,” he said, speaking from his heart and cock. “If the world learned how truly sacred this land is, they’d leave it alone.”
No, they wouldn’t. They’d be drawn here.
“Not if she warned that a crush of people would destroy the link with the spirits. I can—I believe I could convince her to tell people to forget what happened in the past and keep this land as nature intended.” He swallowed. “I would work with her. Instead of putting my energy into trying to block the development as I’ve been doing, I’d champion what is my heritage and the heritage of everyone I call family.”
Stop it! Your fucking her has robbed you of your wisdom. How can you believe words from either of you will change human nature? Man is greedy.