by T. S. Joyce
Because I was going to do something silly. Something dangerous. Something that would put me and my tender little heart at risk, but I needed to do this. I needed to know.
A wise woman didn’t mosey into a werewolf den without food, and I liked to think I was at least a little wise.
Mother poured us a couple of glasses of strong eggnog, and chatted about old times, and silly things I’d done as a child, and with each passing minute, this place settled into my bones more and more. I’d missed it here. Not just the home, but the people, who made it home.
The final piece to this puzzle would fit or not by the end of tonight.
Now, I could get away with a more relaxed fashion. Functionality over looks, so I pulled a thick jacket over my shoulders and tied a scarf around my neck to protect it from the cold. There was a break in the snow, and my father already had his buckskin mare hooked to the small riding wagon out front. Honestly, I was surprised. I’d thought he would’ve put up more of a fight, and persuaded me to stay in for the evening. Perhaps he and Mother had learned to let that overprotectiveness go, while I was in Boston. That or he figured there was no use arguing. I had a stubborn, independent streak a mile wide.
As I walked out of the house with my fresh cornbread all wrapped in red and white printed holiday linen, my father asked through a teasing smile, “Do you still remember how to drive, City Slicker?”
A lady mustn’t ever roll her eyes, but with him, I could. “I’m sure it’ll come back to me.”
I climbed into the wagon and pulled the thick fur over my lap. With a frown for it, I asked, “Where did you get a bear hide?”
My father was petting Lena, the mare, and he didn’t look up from her as he answered. “Ukiah leaves gifts on the front stoop. He never comes in to talk, he leaves them in the night.”
“Then how do you know it’s him leaving the gifts?” I asked primly.
Father gave me a withering look, and shook his head. “Child, you never saw the whole picture.”
“He pushed me away.”
“No, baby. He saw your potential. He set you free.” My father stood back and smacked Lena on the hip, and she lurched forward. “Go straight there and straight back. No worrying your mother.”
Another eye roll was what he got. “Yes, sir,” I murmured. “Worry-warts, both of you.”
“That’s what parents do,” he called as the wagon passed. “Someday you’ll understand.”
But he was wrong. I wouldn’t ever have what he and my mother did. There were two worlds, and I was constantly stuck between them. Which culture did I fit into? I was teased for both. What home made sense for me? Boston was a blustering city, and this place still had wilderness that stretched as far as the eye could see. The city was all manners and pedigree, while here, I could dress like a man and ride a horse split-legged, and no one would bat an eyelash. I didn’t have a clue where I belonged. Gads, some days, I didn’t even know who I was. Who I really was. What man would settle with a woman who didn’t have a place in the world?
The way to the Dawson Ranch was long, but I had it memorized like the back of my hand. This was the one thing about this place that hadn’t changed. The road was still the same winding narrow path that could only fit a single wagon. If I met another on the road, one of us would have to pull into the snow bank and wait for the other to pass. There was a great likelihood that I would know anyone who passed me here. The town had grown and changed, but out here? Not much ever changed. Families stayed on their land and in their homes for generations.
The clop clop of Lena’s hooves against the thin layer of ice under the snowy road was relaxing. It was so much different than the sound of trotting hooves on paved streets like in Boston. Everyone was always in a rush there. Here, the pace was slower and the sound was muffled and lulled me into and easy smile, and humming a Christmas carol under my breath to the beat of her hooves.
It was still snowing a little, but the wind had died down, and thank goodness for that, because out here, that wind could be a bitter enemy.
Ukiah. How many hours had we spent together growing up? My mother was dear friends with the Dawson Brides, as the townspeople called them. Three women, all very different, but each very tough in her own right. They had to be to marry werewolves. That part, the town didn’t know. Oh sure, there were rumors about those Dawson men. They were a little too growly, and aggressive to be invisible in a town like this. But they’d managed to keep their secrets through the years.
As far as I knew, my family were the only people they’d ever told they were werewolves. That trust had always meant the world to me.
This journey was much longer than I remembered it being, but perhaps that was because I was anxious to see him again. Ukiah. Just the thought of his name brought a fluttering to my heart that I’d tried to tamper for years. My feelings for Ukiah had always been very strong, but he’d only seen me as a friend.
I took Lena straight under the Dawson Ranch sign the boys had erected ten years back, and past the three large cabins that belonged to Jeremiah, Luke, and Gable. On the front porch of Gable and Lucianna’s home, there sat the legend himself. The Gable. He was a decorated war hero, with a scarred-up face from his time fighting, but he still had that same old smile, and the same two-fingered wave, and knowing expression on his face that he’d worn every time I’d come to visit my friend.
“I wondered if you would show up here tonight,” he called.
“Were you waiting for me?” I teased, halting Lena in front of his white-washed cabin.
“That I was. I could hear Elias’s clumsy horse from a mile away. Figured it was you.”
“Happy holidays,” I said, wrapping the bear skin blanket tighter over my legs.
“Same to you. You grew up on us, Maya. I’m real glad you’re back.”
“Me, too.” She hooked the reins on the wagon to keep Lena still and hopped down, grabbed the cornbread from the back. “This’ll be cold by now,” I told him. “How’s your mate?”
Gable’s eyes filled with worry as he inhaled deeply and took the offered cornbread. “She’s tired.”
“God…dammit!” Luke called from his cabin across the clearing. “Maya, you lost me a bet, girl.”
“Ha, ha, ha.” Gable’s laugh echoed. “I fuckin’ told you she would be here.”
Luke still had his long hair, but it had a little more silver in it now. Same blazing green eyes and grumpy frown as he hooked his hands on his waist and kicked at a snow clump at the edge of his porch. “I ain’t wearin’ it.”
“You made the bet, you’ll follow through. You gave me your word as a Dawson!” Gable yelled, standing up.
Oh Lordy, here they went.
“Did you two bet on when I would show up?” I guessed.
“No,” Gable said, lifting his chin high. “We made a bet on which one of you would go hunt the other down first. You or Ukiah.”
“Oh. Well there was a dead rabbit on the porch this morning,” I enlightened them both, knowing darn-well Luke would hear me with his wolf senses from all the way across the clearing.
“No!” Gable yelled, at the same time as Luke pointed at Gable and crowed, “I knew it!”
A giggle bubbled up my throat. I couldn’t help myself; this was just like old times. The Dawson men had to be the most entertaining people.
“Is he here?” I asked around a laugh.
Gable sighed but it turned into a growl that lifted chills on my arms. I wasn’t used to the animal noises anymore.
“Part of him is here.” Gable turned and walked back inside without another word.
I didn’t understand what he meant, but that’s the way Gable had always been. When he was done talking, he was just…done.
Confused, I lifted my skirts and stepped back up into the wagon and said, “Yip,” as I slapped the reins on Lena’s back. Some horses reacted best with a gentle touch, but not Lena. If I didn’t show her I was in charge, she would’ve stood here looking over her shoulder at me like I
was a buffoon.
Straight past Jeremiah and Luke’s cabins, the woods swallowed me. I could see a lantern light up ahead, but around me was just silence and trees, and snow that didn’t boast a single footprint or animal mark. Critters tended to be wary of werewolf territory. The most I’d ever seen out here were birds.
Lena stopped and snorted, blowing steam out of her nostrils like a freight train. Her ears twitched back and forth, and I smiled, and looked up into the branches above. Perched on a thick pine branch was a man with long, straight, whipping, raven-colored hair. His cheek bones were high and sharp, and his lips were full. He wore deer skin leggings and thick soled boots under those, but the shirt he wore was thin, cream-colored cotton. His arms were much bigger than I remembered. His shoulders threatened to rip out of the threadbare linen.
“I should’ve known you would be in the trees,” I murmured.
Ukiah jumped down, down, down, and landed with little impact near the wagon. Lena pranced and whinnied, but Ukiah padded over to her silently and rubbed his hand down her neck. “Shhhhh.” He took his eyes off the horse and slid his attention to me, and I was struck, like I’d been so many times, by the light glow in his gray eyes. He would smell like a wolf right now. It always happened when his eyes glowed.
“I…” What could I say that would make any sense right now? I brought cornbread for Lucianna? He could hear lies in a voice. Truth had always been best with him. “We found the rabbit, and I wanted to see you.” Why did I feel like crying? He hadn’t even said a word to me, and already my throat was tightening up.
“Was it good?” he asked, in that deep, reverberating voice of his. He’d been raised by Gable and Lucianna since he was six, but he still had a slight accent from his native language and his time spent on the reservation. I would never admit it out loud, but I loved the way he spoke.
“The stew was incredible. I would’ve brought you some, but my father ate three helpings and there were only scraps left.”
Ukiah broke out in a big grin. He’d always had the best smile, so white against the dark tone of his skin. “Elias eats more than any human I’ve ever seen.”
I laughed, because he was right.
Lena was completely calm under his touch now, her ears twitching with curiosity and her steaming breath coming steady.
I studied the ground under his tree. “How did you get up there? I don’t see any footprints.”
“Perhaps I was waiting for hours and the falling snow covered my prints.”
“Really?”
Another smile. “No.” He pulled Lena’s halter and led her toward his cabin, and I was struck with how different he looked. Ukiah had always been thin as a whip, no matter how much his parents had fed him. But while I’d been away making changes on myself, he had been doing the same. Changing. His back was broad, and he looked even taller than Gable now, who was already a monstrous man. Ukiah’s waist tapered to a V where his shirt tucked into his tanned leggings.
“You don’t wear braids anymore,” I observed.
“I do sometimes.”
“Why not right now?” I’d rarely seen his hair down like this.
“Because the wolf takes my body away too much. The braids don’t stay when I Turn back into a man.”
I was shivering in the cold breeze now, and moved to secure the blanket over my lap better, but Ukiah turned suddenly, and hopped up into the wagon, yanked it off me and wrapped it around my shoulders without missing a beat of time. I was captured by his eyes. Gray like dawn light and glowing from the inside out, searching mine as I existed ensnared in his charisma. Releasing a shuddering breath, I uttered something I’d sworn to keep to myself. “I missed you.”
Ukiah’s hands were clasped on the blanket, cinching it to me, but he lifted one hand and pulled his fingertips down one of the curls that had escaped on the drive here. He leaned forward and sniffed it, rolled his eyes closed and rested his cheek against mine. I couldn’t help the sigh that escaped my throat. He lingered there, warm and comforting for three breaths, and then he released me. I’d said three words, and he’d said a hundred more with just a touch.
“You never wrote me back,” I murmured, still stung by the pain of the separation those years ago.
“You didn’t need to stay in your past, Maya. You needed to focus on where you were.”
“It felt so cold. Like you didn’t care or—”
Ukiah cut me off with a look. With fire in his eyes, he shook his head once, hard. Don’t.
Fury boiled right through my blood. “I’m not the same girl who left here, Ukiah. I learned how to speak my mind and I’ll say what I want, and what I think. You didn’t talk to me for weeks leading up to my leaving. Over and over you would cut me off and leave until you didn’t talk to me at all. I left here with a sadness that weighed my whole heart down to the ground, and I still got the courage to write to you. You never wrote back. Not once. And I was the silly girl who checked the post religiously for a whole year, hoping one of my letters touched you and you would respond. Did you get my last one?” I asked.
Ukiah pulled Lena to a stop in front of his cabin, the one he and Luke, Jeremiah and his father had built the summer before I left this place. He scratched at the stubble on his jaw. “I remember.”
“Do you? Did you even open it up?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed audibly. “It was a Christmas card with a hand-drawn red bird on the front. Dear Ukiah. I assume that you are busy at the reservation now. You always go there in the winter, during the holidays. I always missed holidays with you. When I was younger, I would imagine spending thanksgiving eating all day and playing chess with you while our parents and your uncles and cousins caused happy chaos around us. And I imagined getting a Christmas tree with you, and going to Christmas Eve services, and the celebration at Cotton’s on Christmas Day. I really, really miss how the whole town would show up to Cotton’s and give tidings to friends and family and loved ones. I always imagined giving you a gift when you showed up to Cotton’s on Christmas day, even when I knew you were at the reservation. It was a fantasy for me. And now mother and father are giving up the restaurant and those imaginings can never come to fruition. The holidays were strange for me, Ukiah. I feel like I can tell you all of this now because you’re silent and sometimes it feels like you’re so far away, maybe you don’t exist at all in my life anymore. There is a sensation of safety in that distance. I was always surrounded by love. By my parents, and yours, and your uncles and aunts. But I was always, always, year after year, lonely during the holidays because I missed you. I miss you. I’ll stop bothering you with these letters. This will be the last one I ever send you. I just wanted you to know you were thought about when you spent time at the reservation. You’re thought about now. Love…Maya.”
By the time he uttered the last words, to say I was shocked was an understatement. He’d recited my last letter. I didn’t remember exactly what I’d written, but I had no doubt he’d just nailed every single word. How many times had he read my card to memorize it like this?
Ukiah angled his face, and the evening shadows caught those sharp cheekbones. “I opened them all.” The corner of his lips turned up in a smile. “Are you done skinning my hide now, woman? I want to get you out of the cold.”
Well hells bells, I parted my lips to say something intelligent and witty, but nothing came out. I tried again. “It’s…well, it’s improper to go into your home now. Unchaperoned.” Oh good one, Maya, you’re a delight.
“Don’t worry, Maya. I’ll make sure the big bad wolf doesn’t get you.” Ukiah jumped off the side of the wagon with such grace, I was dumbfounded. Smoothly, he held out his large, calloused hand, and the smile was reaching his glowing gray eyes now. Even standing on the ground, he was still just as tall as I was, sitting on the seat of the wagon, and his straight black hair whipped to the side in the wind. No man had ever looked as striking as Ukiah Dawson.
When I hesitated touching his hand, he reached forwa
rd and gripped my hips, lifted me easily out of the wagon before I could react. And there his strong hands stayed while I looked up at him and was bombarded by a hundred memories. He’d always been taller than me, and six years older. More mature. Quieter, but with this sturdy presence that made me feel so safe. Nothing could harm me when I was near Ukiah.
He released me suddenly and took three quick steps back, then gestured for me to go ahead of him inside.
Hot and cold. Hot and cold. And here I was, just as confused as I’d been the last years I lived here. I had to know. “Is she here?”
“She who?” he asked in that deep baritone timbre.
“Tomotu.”
His eyes went round and he ducked his gaze to the snow. “How did you hear about that?”
“Gable told my father. You were seeing a Ute woman named Tomotu. He thought you would settle down with her.”
“She wasn’t real.”
The frown in my brows deepened so much, my face hurt with it. “What do you mean?”
“Tomotu means winter. I told him I was leaving here for winter, and he thought it was a name, not a season. And I allowed the mistake. He stopped asking me about you when he thought I was going to the reservation to visit Tomotu. Stopped talking about you. It was a relief. You were already…”
“Already what?”
Ukiah straightened his spine and pushed his shoulders back, clasped his hands behind him and looked around his woods. “You were already everywhere.”
“Memories of me?”
He nodded once.
In that way, I’d been lucky. Ukiah had never been to Boston, and there were no memories of him there. I didn’t have flashbacks of us taking in a show, or eating in restaurants there. I didn’t have to avoid any places that we’d spent time together when I didn’t feel like thinking of him. But me?
“You marked up every inch of this place,” Ukiah said, as if he could see right into my thoughts. And maybe he could. Over the years, I’d thought he had magic in him. Werewolf with the knowledge of his people, both Ute and Dawson.