“I told you I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Look, I’m pretty sure we joined Legion for the same reason. A cure, right?” I had picked up her scent in the Biogen building twice, which suggested they were working on her too. I took her silence now to mean yes. “I’m just wondering how you’ve managed that part of yourself for so long.”
She narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “What do you mean?”
“How have you kept that part of you from, you know, ruling the rest of you?”
For a moment, I thought she was going to shut me down, but her eyes relaxed. “Years of practice. And with these.” She held up her palms so I was looking at her hand tattoos.
I had never seen them up close. The blood-red patterns were more complex than I’d realized. The closest things I could compare them to were Tibetan mandalas. But where mandalas were ornate, the markings that stained her palms looked harsh. Takara closed her fingers back over them and lowered her hands.
“Who drew them?” I asked.
“A teacher,” she answered. “They control the fire. But to control the mind, I sit in silence.”
I thought of all the hours Takara spent in meditation. I’d always assumed the practice was to focus her power, and maybe that was part of it, but she seemed to be telling me it was also to barricade her dragon dimension—something she’d had to have done for the last fifty years, at least.
Was that what it took?
“I can show you sometime,” she said.
Her offer surprised me. “Yeah? That might be good.”
The problem was I needed control over my wolf now.
“Was there anything else?” she asked.
I was about to dismiss her, but she was looking at me with the most openness I’d ever seen on her face. “Look, I know it couldn’t have been easy losing your family,” I said. “I was only a teenager when I lost my parents, and it wasn’t anything like what you went through.”
“You know nothing about my family,” she snapped, her words as sharp as her retractable blades. The red crescents flashed around irises that seemed to have gone a deeper, more forbidding shade of black.
“I wasn’t suggesting I did.”
Takara glared at me, lips compressing as though her dragon fury was going to erupt and consume the entire armory at any moment, but she spun abruptly and left.
I swore at myself. I’d seen an opening to deepen our relationship and gone about it badly. I hoped that hadn’t set us back to square one. But more pressing was my meeting with Nadie. I didn’t have hand tattoos or years of mental training and practice to lean on. I just had the knowledge of who I had been before becoming the Blue Wolf, and whom I still loved.
That would have to be enough.
15
My nostrils flared as I peered up the snow-blown ridge. I’d had Sarah drop me off downwind from the meeting place, and now I was pacing restlessly, my wolf brain picking through the olfactory threads.
There—Nadie’s scent.
I climbed part way up the ridge, past towering spruce and pine trees, until I found a secluded spot for my weapons cache. Choosing a section of ground where a fallen tree had decomposed and softened the earth, I dug out a hole. I peered around to ensure I was alone, then set my duffel bag at the hole’s bottom and covered it up.
I completed the climb until I was standing at the top of White Ridge, so named for the limestone cliffs along one face. Nadie had chosen a spot away from the town, but still close enough that her pack wouldn’t risk coming for her. Her scent set off more charges in my wolf mind. I opened my mouth to call for her, but what emerged was the beginning of a howl that I bit off.
Picking up movement to my left, I snapped my head around and found her approaching through the snow in wolf form. Her gold eyes glimmered in the dark markings of her face.
I cleared my throat, but my voice still growled. “I’m here.”
She brushed my hip with her shoulder, then circled back. “I can see that.”
“Now tell me what you know. That was the deal.”
When she rose and reached toward my head, I drew away. “What are you doing?”
“I’m not going to talk to a helmet.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You sound caged.”
I had never liked wearing the thing, and as we stood there, snow falling through the growing dusk, wind blowing through the trees, I did want to be free of it. Not seeing the harm, I undid the hasps that connected the helmet to my suit and lifted it off my head. The cold hit my face in an invigorating rush. Nadie’s scent rushed in too, and I took a step back.
She smiled. “Better?”
“What do you know about the creature we’re hunting?” I asked.
I was skeptical she knew anything, that claiming to have info was a ploy to get me alone. But it would have been irresponsible not to follow up, especially if her father proved a dead end.
Nadie surprised me when she said, “What you hunt is a man-eater. It’s always hungry. This is why it holds its prey captive. It will not consume them until the hunger becomes unbearable. But the abatement doesn’t last. No, the more it kills and consumes, the hungrier it grows.”
That fit with the shortening windows between abductions and killings. It also fit with what Yoofi had sensed upon our arrival: something hungry. None of that bode well for Ms. Welch.
“How do we find it?”
“Remove your suit first.”
“This isn’t strip Q&A,” I growled.
“And you aren’t naked underneath that.”
She was right, of course. In anything, my layer of blue hair had been thickening for the past week with the cooling weather. But I didn’t like giving her this kind of control. “No more games. I asked you a question.”
Her eyes moved up and down my suit.
“Not going to answer me?” I said. “Then it’s time to go back to your pack.”
I shot out a hand for her scruff. She recoiled just as quickly, leaving me to swipe through air. She pranced around me, gold eyes glimmering with mischief. When I lunged for her, she sprang to one side, and I ended up on hands and feet too. She put a tree between us and peeked out from behind it. Her scent had sharpened with excitement. This was a big turn-on for her. She wanted me to chase her. And the wolf in me wanted to give chase.
Daniela, I told myself.
I rose back to two legs. “We had a deal.”
“It’s just an artificial layer of fabric,” she said.
We were wasting time. With an annoyed grunt, I removed my boots and dug my clawed toes into the snow and soil as I undid the fasteners on my digital uniform. My pores opened to the chill Canadian air as the suit came away, and for the first time in what felt like forever my entire body breathed.
I watched Nadie’s eyes change as she looked me over. She liked the massive, muscled form in front of her.
“How do we find it?” I repeated.
She stepped from behind the tree, heat rising from her body in drifts of steam. “It cannot be tracked like an animal. It is hunger, absorbing everything around it, including the scent of its victims. You must see it to pursue it. And the only sure way to see it is to call its name.”
“What’s its name?”
“It comes from the ancient language. I will not speak it because it’s a cursed name, especially for the Cree, but I can tell you its meaning. Then you can find it yourself. There are ceremonies for calling it, but none for killing it.”
If I’d learned anything from Sarah’s lectures it was that every Prod 1 had a weakness. Aranck’s pack might not know how to kill this one, but we would find a way, even if it meant consulting Professor Croft. With that info, we could call it up and then put it down permanently.
“What does its name mean?” I pressed.
“I’ll tell you after the hunt.”
“What hunt?”
Smiling, she turned from me and closed her eyes to the wind and snow. “Can’t you smell it?�
�
All I smelled right now was her. Between that and the pitched battle in my head to keep my wolf from breaking out of its pen, I wasn’t attuned to much else. But now I picked up a scent, the same one as in my recurring dream—the scent of something large and plodding.
Hunger stirred in the pit of my stomach.
“There’s no time to hunt,” I said, swallowing and turning from her.
Nadie moved in a circle around me, brushing against my hips again. “I feel your hunger, Captain Wolfe. Your body is telling you to feed. You’re still not fully recovered. You need strength.”
Ever since the battle with Aranck, and being poisoned by silver, I hadn’t been one hundred percent. Even after healing, it seemed like a part of my core had been hollowed out—the part where my stomach happened to sit.
It shook with another hungry growl.
“See there?” Nadie nudged me with her head. “Come.”
She pranced down the ridge a few paces, then stopped and reared her head to the sky. The howl that broke through the fog of her breath resounded beautifully. As it echoed off, members of her pack began to answer from miles away. But the call wasn’t meant for them.
She peered at me over a shoulder, then took off in powerful bounds. I responded with a booming howl. The wolf was out. The bonding that enabled me to walk like a man but run like a lupine took over. I fell to all fours and followed Nadie, her scent mingling with that of our prey and the wild, snow-covered land around us in an intoxicating rush.
I caught up to Nadie and passed her. She gave the hunt over to me, keeping pace at my flank. Our calls had alerted our quarry. As we broke into a meadow, I spotted the moose galloping from the river where it had been drinking, its large body glistening as it made for the tree line.
This is crazy, I thought.
But the wolf in me was too absorbed in the head-pounding thrill of the hunt to care what its human companion thought.
I charged across the meadow and caught the moose just as it reached the first trees. It was the dream all over again: The churning muscles of the beast’s flank inside my rending jaws. Its legs kicking beneath me. Nadie landing on its back. The moose heaving its rack around to get her off him. And then me going for its throat, my mouth filling with the metallic taste of its blood.
With a growl, I snapped my head to one side and tore out the moose’s throat. The beast fell heavily. No sooner than it hit the ground, Nadie and I commenced to feed. Our words from earlier gave over to grunts and the sounds of ripping flesh.
Nadie had been right. Every chunk of the animal I took down was like refilling a reservoir. Soon my body was throbbing with strength and energy. When I reached the heart, I broke through the thick vessels anchoring it and took it in my jaws. Instead of gobbling it down like I’d done everything else, I found myself presenting the gourd of muscle to Nadie.
It was her kill too.
Take it, she said. You need your strength.
She hadn’t spoken the words aloud. They reached me through a collective consciousness, but not that of her pack. This was a splinter connection, exclusive to us.
Take it, she repeated, her head buried deep in the moose’s stomach.
We share, I said.
She lifted her head, muzzle dark with blood, and stepped toward me. Images crashed through my mind—mating, shifter children, growing our own pack. They should have sent me running. Instead, I held the heart toward her. Our lips touched as her teeth cleaved neatly through the muscle.
I took my half down and then closed my eyes as a massive dose of moose adrenaline ran through me like electricity. When I opened them again, everything was crisper, clearer.
I left the moose carcass and walked several paces to a large circle of bare ground beneath a spruce. I lay down to let the meal settle, satisfied in a way I’d never quite been satisfied before. While I’d gorged, Nadie had been more selective. Beyond my outstretched legs, she continued to feed, her white coat luminescent amid the falling snow.
When I caught myself admiring her, my Jason mind struggled awake. What in the hell was I doing? There was a Prod 1 out there. There was a wolf pack waiting for me to return their daughter. There was a mission we needed to finish. There was a woman waiting for me back home.
I tried to rally myself, to get up and take back control, but to my wolf, this was the most natural thing in the world. Loaded with food, his intention to remain here with Nadie sat on my will like an immovable load. No matter how hard I tried to call it up, Daniela remained a murky presence in my memory. At last, the she-wolf stood back from the kill, licked her muzzle, and came over.
“Feeling better?” she asked. Beneath her teasing voice was a tender concern for my well-being.
“Much,” I admitted.
She settled beside me, head against my chest. Her weight and warmth felt good.
I remembered Daniela’s dream—You called to tell me you weren’t coming back. Not because you couldn’t, but because you didn’t want to. But it felt so damned distant.
“That’s because this is who you are,” Nadie said. “This is where you belong.”
I thought she was responding to my memory, but it was to my comment. I gazed across the meadow to the trees and the white cliffs standing above them. As long as I remained the Blue Wolf, nothing less than the wilderness would suffice for a home. Nothing less than a hunt and kill would fully sate my appetite. Along the same lines, no one besides another shifter would understand me so completely. It was delusion to think otherwise.
You’re not going to remain the Blue Wolf, my Jason mind insisted.
But when Nadie started to lick the blood from around my mouth, I let her. In wolf language, it wasn’t sexual. She was grooming me. When she finished, I reciprocated until we were both clean. But that was where it had to end. With Herculean effort, I pushed myself to my feet.
“About the meaning of that name,” I said.
As Nadie rose in front of me, a shadow seemed to pass across her markings. “I fear for you.”
“The creature has taken someone who needs our help.”
For several moments she didn’t say anything. Vapor snaked from her moist nostrils as her gold eyes searched mine. She wasn’t playing games now. Her concern was palpable. I touched her cheek.
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “Our team is trained to handle these kinds of—”
Bark sprayed across my face at the same moment I heard the crack of the rifle. I pulled Nadie to the ground, my heart slamming. The shot had come from behind me, downwind from our position. I opened my nostrils anyway and picked up the stringent scent of silver.
Nadie’s muzzle wrinkled from her teeth, telling me she could smell it too.
There’s cover over there, I said through our budding connection, nudging her toward a gully. We made our way over, staying low to the ground. Two more shots cracked off, but they were high.
Who’s shooting? Nadie asked when we arrived.
Don’t know, I replied. But that they were armed with silver told me they knew what they were doing. Maybe Centurion’s assessment had gotten around and some hunters had decided to go looking for werewolves themselves. The shots hadn’t reported like hunting rifles, though. We were talking military grade, the last two sounding an awful lot like shots from an AR-10.
There are four, Nadie said. Maybe a fifth, but it’s hard to tell.
How do you know?
I hear their breaths, plus two are moving.
I focused until I could hear movement too. Slow, silent, trained.
Where are the other two? I asked.
Instead of answering, a crude image filled our collective mind. It showed the meadow and our position in it. On the far side, about two hundred meters away, two had taken up positions, probably the ones who had fired the first shots. The two in motion were coming around the sides of the meadow, trying to box us in. An opening remained to the south.
Go, I told her.
You can’t stay. They have silver.
Then I need to disarm them. Otherwise, they’ll keep hunting us.
Then I’m staying too.
If not for the silver, I would have liked our odds.
Listen, I said, when I was climbing the ridge to meet you, I buried a bag of weapons.
I know. I watched you.
And here I thought I’d been covert. I need you to get it, I said. I looked toward the south end of the meadow and zeroed in on a thick stand of trees. I’ll join you over there.
What are you going to be doing?
Finding out who we’re up against.
Be careful, she said.
You too.
She took off, staying low to the ground. I expected shots, but by the time the hunters would have sighted on her, she was already behind cover and gone. I brought a finger to my earpiece and realized it wasn’t there. I swore under my breath. It must have fallen out somewhere between removing my helmet and racing down here. With both drones over the search grid, my teammates had no damned idea where I was or what was happening.
I considered breaking south after Nadie, but I meant what I’d told her. A group of determined hunters armed with silver ammo would only complicate the mission. I wondered how they’d even found us, before remembering the booming howl I’d released prior to the hunt.
Good one, I thought bitterly.
With Nadie gone and the memory of the hunt dimming, I could feel my control returning. And I wasn’t happy with where the Blue Wolf had taken things. But the question now was how to handle the hunters. I couldn’t blame them for wanting to end the threat. They were just mistaken about what that threat was—and now I was in their firing lane.
The two coming around the sides of the meadow had stopped. I could see slivers of one of them peering from behind a tree through night-vision goggles. I had ID’d his weapon correctly. He was bearing a heavy AR-10. His equipment coupled with his stance told me former military. The same was probably true of the rest of them. They were positioned in a quadrangle so they all had lines of sight on one another. I would be hard pressed to reach one without the other three seeing.
Blue Howl (Blue Wolf Book 3) Page 12