by Leigh Evans
On the other hand, I was no longer being dragged willy-nilly down the garden path.
Merry squirmed her way out from the crush of my cleavage to find a lookout perch on my shoulder blade. Her little ivy feet prickled my back when a series of urgent, excited barks and hoarse shouts erupted from the inside of the trailer.
“No!” yelled my brother.
I listened with half an ear to the sharp crack of crockery, soon followed by a hailstorm of small thuds, pretty much on top of each other.
That had to be the bowl of oranges.
“Leave the ferret!” shouted Lexi from our home. “Ow! You little—”
“Hey, she’s just curious!” hollered Biggs over the barking. “She’s not going to—”
Another crash.
And that was either the toaster or the kettle.
“Get that animal out of the house!” roared Cordelia.
Some mornings should come with big, fat, round, red reset buttons.
“Rolling,” I informed Merry before I did just that. She scrambled then held on to a pinch of jersey as I did a quick pelvic tilt to adjust my wadded-up T-shirt. Then we lay there, squinting against the brightness of the rising sun, listening to things break.
What was that old saying? Come the morning, all shall be well?
Ha, ha, and ha.
I raised myself up onto an elbow.
Trowbridge-the-wolf was busy nosing my empty sleeping bag as if it were a scent catalogue of my naughty dalliances.
At my huff of total disbelief, he turned.
Last night, in the dim gloom of the moonlit field, it had been difficult to get a sense of just how relatively large an animal his wolf was. But now as he approached me, Alpha-proud, massive head lifted in inquiry, the waist-high weeds lining the path seemed to shrink in size.
My wolf, moaned my inner-Were.
Oh shut up.
His scent investigation of my person started with my foot.
I pushed myself into a sitting position because Hedi Peacock-Stronghold had some things she needed to say. “Trowbridge,” I began, with remarkable civility considering he was sniffing my instep like it was an item on an exotic menu that he was as yet undecided about.
“Trowbridge!” I repeated.
This time, the gray wolf responded to his name with a piece of canine articulation that could have meant anything from “nice pedicure” to “I’ll pencil in a chat for sometime later next week.” Then, quite uncaring of my affronted glare, he resumed his ruthless examination of my body.
Snuffle, snuffle, snuffle.
I leaned to the right and then to the left in an effort to avoid it. But it didn’t matter how I squirmed or pushed at him, his big, inquisitive nose still nuzzled my hair, dampened my T-shirt, and found the pulse at the side of my throat.
He was, after all, an Alpha male.
“Enough!” I said, sharper than I meant to. “We need to talk. One paw means yes, two paws means no, okay?”
Blue eyes, rimmed with black, studied me.
As I gazed into them, doubt—like cold water on bare toes—washed over me. Those eyes were almost the same hue as those of the guy whom I’d shoved through the portal, but within their icy depths, there was no warming spark of recognition, no comet of light brightening that sea of azure. Whoever—whatever—lived behind those eyes was not precisely Trowbridge. And from the looks of it, that half-wild entity was as perplexed about me as I was about it.
Eight hours with a tail had changed the balance of who he was.
“Trowbridge? You in there?” I asked. “Can you understand me?”
Nothing. No paw lifted in greeting. No head tilt of inquiry.
Mine, whined my Were, impatient with my fumbling.
I drew up my knees and clasped them to my chest while I considered this new spin on the Hedi Wheel of Disaster. The sun was shining and I had a wolf for a mate. His paw was larger than my hand. Dried blood had caked the fur on his muzzle and powerful chest. And he far outweighed me—not surprising when one took into account the fact that he was a solid wall of fur and muscle.
“It’s going to be a bitch to search your coat for ticks,” I muttered, feeling grim.
And that’s when the sleeping volcano inside me started spewing ash and fireballs.
As far as my inner-bitch was concerned, my off-the-cuff comment was tantamount to the squirrel perched on the fence; the cat sunning itself on her front steps; the Yorkie terrier taking a piss on her shrubbery.
She was done.
Too many months she’d sat in my gut, being jostled by my Fae, kept belly-low by my constant checks and counterchecks. Too long she’d waited for the return of what had been promised her. Trowbridge’s wolf was hers—to claim, to protect, to fight for—and no one, including me, was going to stop her from trying to do so.
With a howl of pain that hurt my heart, she tore into me, attacking me from the inside in a flurry of frantic pawing. Let me out! She fought—claws slashing—utterly heedless of the damage she was inflicting to our shields.
Let me out!
I bowed over my belly, fighting to contain her.
Want to run! Want to be! Want, want, want …
Trowbridge placed a heavy paw on my thigh.
I looked up at him, my eyes flooding. Don’t you see? She’s tearing me apart.
She’s mine, the wolf’s cool gaze replied.
I hurt. She hurt. We hurt.
Then again, so briefly, I saw a flash of the big picture—all nicely assembled and coherent—slide by me. I’d struggled to grab on to it for months—no, not months, years—and there it was, shooting past me, the diagram to my life, the snapshot of my problems.
But it went by so quickly; I didn’t have time to grab it with both hands. All I got was the barest fragment of the whole truth. And I wished, oh, how I wished, I hadn’t. In a bitter moment of utter clarity, I saw the thing I didn’t want to see. The picture viewed from the other side—and from that viewpoint, the self-restraint that I’d so heroically forced on myself no longer looked like self-discipline; it looked like self-loathing.
A cruelty.
To her. To me.
Even my Fae recognized it. “Release her,” she said. “Else we will break apart.”
And so we did. Mortal-me and Fae-me stepped back, and we let the animal within us run free.
Yes! Sister-wolf cried, shaking loose the strangling choke collar. Her essence surged through us, and with it came her emotions. Not muted. Not dampened. The purest of pleasures—canine joy—rose in our chest. Happiness—skin-singing happiness, so pure, so unadulterated, so free. It suspended my breath.
No side thoughts. No doubts. No pauses for logic tests.
Just him and her. At last, at last.
To touch. To smell. To taste.
Our arms looped around the neck of her beloved wolf, our face pressed itself deep inside his thick, dense pelt, and we knew a happiness that had been denied for too, too long.
Woods, and pine, and sex, and yes—a little bit of blood from the kill.
She knew him to be strong.
She knew him to be hers.
And all was simple and good.
* * *
I don’t know how long it went on—the stroking of his fur, the inarticulate murmurs of contentment coming from my throat, the rumbles from his, the sense of homecoming that I siphoned from my Were.
But here’s a sad fact: sweet things will always dissolve under a hot tongue. In this case, Lexi’s. I hadn’t noticed that the turmoil inside my silver home had stopped. Or that our wolves’ tender reunion was being watched and judged.
“That is a wolf, not your mate.” Lexi pushed back his bowler.
Tell me something I don’t know.
But I uncoiled my arm from the gray wolf’s neck. He gave me a chuff. Which meant more to Anu than me—she began stalking toward me, nape bristling, but Harry checked her with his knee. “No,” he said in English. And quite surprisingly, she stopped. Right there, bet
ween Biggs and Harry.
I dragged my fingers lightly through Trowbridge’s pelt.
“Will he stay like this?”
“No.” Lexi stroked his ferret pet. “He’ll change when he’s ready.”
“When will that be?”
My twin turned to gaze at the Trowbridge ridge. “He’ll wait till he’s home.”
Chapter Fifteen
The Trowbridge house was an old brick Victorian, every ninety-degree angle on the building embellished with a curlicue of wood. Six months isn’t long, but it’s long enough to make a house appear well and truly abandoned. Paint had begun peeling off its exterior, revealing the yellow brick beneath it, and the grass was mostly of the crab variety.
Something smelled bad.
Trowbridge’s four paws were planted on the porch, his impatience telegraphed in his stance. His wolf uttered a sharp, reproving bark at the door. I tried its handle. “It’s locked.” My stomach twisted at the rank smell seeping through the cracks in the door. “I don’t have the key. Does anyone have the—”
“I can send Biggs to the camper to fetch it,” Cordelia broke in.
A low, warning rumble from the gray wolf.
“Wait, there’s a spare.” Biggs lifted a white hanging planter down from its hook, and dug his fingers into the soil around the petrified geranium. “It used to be just—” A couple of cigarette butts fell and rolled down the slanting porch. “Got it,” he said.
I stood aside to let Biggs fit the key to the lock, only to find myself shoved forward by Trowbridge’s impatient snout. “Give it to me,” I said.
The instant the door swung wide, the stench slapped me hard—a horrible invisible cloud of it—hamburger meat gone bad. Trowbridge’s wolf entered first, nose wrinkled, lips curled. Hand covering my nose, I took a step in.
“The light switch is on your left,” muttered Biggs.
My hand grazed the wall. Light from the single, weak bulb illuminated the hallway, but didn’t penetrate the gloom beyond it. Biggs strode over to the bay windows to yank aside the living room’s heavy curtains. The bay windows were reluctant to open, but he and Cordelia forced them up, one by one. That helped, adding light and airflow where there was none before, but not in the way I needed. What I needed was for it all to be gone. The foul smell of the dried blood—so strong, so putrid—completely scrubbed out of the air. The shadows banished, or at least tamed. My gaze saw too many of them: a gray mass behind the battered easy chair, a collection of ghouls beyond the overturned table. They waited for Trowbridge and me, memories from that nightmarish spring night that had somehow taken spectral shape.
Goddess, I’d told Biggs to seal the house, but I’d forgotten, hadn’t I?
The blood. The gore.
I should have come back and cleaned it myself. Sanitized the room, been brave enough to personally exorcise the ghosts with bleach and paint before the door was sealed from curious eyes.
Part of me rued that, as Trowbridge’s wolf padded over to the fireplace. Framed in his father’s hearth, he lifted his heavy head up high and let out a howl.
Long, deep, mournful—the call of an Alpha.
My Were flooded mortal-me with sensation. Pleasurable, but not loopy canine joy. This felt raw, and intense, and somehow primordial. It poured into me, almost sexual in feel, but instead of coming from my loins, it came from her truest core—and its thrill flooded outward, a warm rush that smothered all the other senses.
The Alpha of Creemore’s call to his pack trailed off.
The reply to his summons came the moment Trowbridge lowered his muzzle. One of the Weres waiting outside let out a howl, and almost immediately after that a female added a long sorrowful note. High and clear, almost a whine. Then another and another. So many voices. So many individual messages woven into one hymn to brotherhood.
Tears glazed my eyes as Trowbridge’s pack sang him all the way through his transformation from wolf to man, their vocalization both mournful and meaningful.
The sound of the gathered pack howling in the daylight should have made my skin crawl.
But it didn’t.
Instead of horror, there was deep comfort; the relief you get when a terrible pain is finally lifted from you.
* * *
Until last summer I’d never been within spitting distance of a wolf as he reverted back into a biped. Yes, my father was a Werewolf. But he was also a loving dad, who was very strict about certain things. “Lock the door behind me,” he’d repeat to my mum as he left for his moon-run. “Don’t open it until I can tell you what day it is.” That type of caution sticks with you. Still, curiosity had chewed at me. One morning, not long into my tenure as Alpha-in-residence, I’d crouched behind a spy hole in the cemetery hedge and watched a wolf turn into a man. Later, Cordelia had cornered me in the trailer. “There are things you need to understand,” she’d said sternly, her arms folded over her chest. “Emotionally, it’s easier to turn from a person into a wolf, than to change from a wolf back to a person. We’re not completely human in those minutes following our transformation. What you did this morning was criminally stupid.”
“I can hurt you,” her eyes had said.
The Alpha of Creemore lay curled on the dusty floor. Two arms. Two legs. No tail.
Silence fell, and grew.
“Hell, back out of the room as quietly as possible,” murmured my brother. I ignored him, staying exactly where I was. Plastered to the inside wall of the living room, heels pressed hard against the baseboards, palms pressed flat.
I couldn’t have moved. Not from fear—I’d never been afraid of Trowbridge.
From anticipation.
I didn’t give a rat’s ass if he wasn’t precisely human for the next few minutes. I’d take what I could get, though as I stared at my mate on the floor, part of me wondered what exactly that was. I’d sent a man named Robson Trowbridge through the Gates of Merenwyn. Prior to that, his wolf, though an essential part of him, had only shown itself to me in flashes, like brief glimpses of the red lining on a dark winter coat. But over the space of a night, the fabric of my mate’s soul had been turned inside out. I could still see his canine nature in the feral spark of his mortal eyes, in the tilt of his head, in the flare of his nostrils.
I could see other things, too.
Morning light is harsh and unforgiving. Goddess, he’s so old. Was that fair? Perhaps not. Weres age a trifle slower than humans. Compared to a normal person, I’d hazard a guess that he could pass for his early thirties. But the brackets beside his wide mouth were deeper. And he seemed … harder. Leaner. All his former pretty-boy features had been rasped away, until he was bone and sinew. And his eyes—they were set so deeply they were almost sunken. Looking at him, you couldn’t help but wonder, what measure of suffering made him so harshly beautiful?
He’s suffered … But going to Merenwyn was supposed to fix that.
Trowbridge turned his head to study the corner of the room.
The wooden chair they’d bound him to was still there, sitting upright by the overturned table. Trowbridge’s arm secured to the table by silver chains, his mouth bloody, his nose broken. “Don’t you do it, Hedi! Don’t you tell them!”
Cold fall air streamed through the bay windows.
My mate was horribly still. He took his time as he gazed at the tableau before him. The chair. The table. The footprints—once bright red, now rusty brown—that circled the chair. Then he slowly spun to face us, and as he did, his dreadlocks rustled and stirred the perfume of deep anger seeping from his skin.
My gaze skittered away, suddenly ashamed, landing on the faded chintz of the easy chair, the dust obscuring the family portrait in the corroded brass frame, and then because—dammit, I’d never been able to tear my eyes from his scorching flame—my eyes flitted back to inventory the rest of the changes. His fisted hand offered no clue to how well his right paw had healed. But the other wounds he’d been given that terrible night—one across each thigh, one high across his chest, one
on each wrist—had faded, their scars now invisible. The same couldn’t be said of his belly wound—the long thin one, in the seam of which they’d placed a filigree chain. The flesh there had knitted itself back together, but roughly. Where the silver had sunk into his belly, the scar was thick and uneven.
White, too. The type of silvery paleness that’s a gift of time’s passage.
Just how much time has passed for him?
He’d always been lean, and still could be called so, because his new physique carried nary an ounce of fat. Over the passage of 196 days on my calendar, he’d widened the way a man does over the course of a decade. His shoulders were bulkier, his pecs were like two hillocks of hard clay on top of a rippling ridge of abdominal muscles. Fae Stars, even his navel had been put on a reducing diet. For the life of me, I couldn’t recall it looking like that—a shallow divot stretched over a taut belly of muscle. The only thing I recognized on his new and improved body was that vein running down his hip. I followed that familiar road map until my gaze picked up the thin, narrow trail of dark hair just a smidge south of that, and then I followed it like a road traveler following an infallible GPS device, all the way to the darker nest of curls, where his—
Mine, mine, murmured my Were in deep approval.
My cheeks grew hot. My gaze darted back to his face.
Wild man’s eyes. A little flicker of one single blue comet did a quick half turn around his dark pupil and then flickered out. He stared at me, with an expression I could only define as a look of distrust.
“Trowbridge?” I said in a little voice.
His brows knitted, then he started across the room, but so very, very slowly and deliberately. One foot placed directly in front of the other. An odd gait—as if he were walking a tightrope—head lowered just the fraction needed to stir fright and trepidation, eyes steady on the target of me.