Red

by Kait Nolan

  Was this a sick joke? Establish some kind of common ground and humor me until he thought he’d talked me down from suicide and could haul me off to the nearest mental ward?

  He didn’t know. He wasn’t like me. How could he be? How could it possibly be true and he still be here? Alive? Sane? No. It flew in the face of everything I knew, everything I was.

  I clenched my jaw but couldn’t hold back the growl. “Everyone who knows what I’m going through is dead. So don’t pretend you have any idea what I’ve been through, what’s happening to me.”

  The hands cradling my face slipped down to grip my shoulders. “You think I don’t know what it’s like? Being overwhelmed by senses that are suddenly sharper than they should be? All those scents, the sounds. They’re enough to make you want to vomit. For the first couple of months, you can’t control it. The headaches? Sometimes they’re enough to nearly blind you with pain. The night sweats and fevers? Well you probably haven’t gotten to those yet. You’re a bit behind on the usual shifting schedule.”

  They could be guesses. Good ones. He was observant. He could easily have noticed the change in my behavior. And my being late shifting, well I’d said that myself in the conversation he’d apparently eavesdropped on earlier tonight.

  “What about the short fuse and uncontrollable aggression?” he continued.

  Oh, like it took a genius to figure out I’d wanted to kill Amber.

  “If I’d been closer to my first transition when my mother was killed, I’d have completely lost it. As it was I nearly killed a guy at school for making a smart ass remark about my mother leaving. Because we couldn’t release the truth, that she’d been shot as a wolf. That’s why I was expelled. Because I put the guy in the hospital. In traction. I was lucky to avoid prison.”

  If he was a wolf, he was doing nothing but proving my point. If he was a wolf, as I was, then we were violent, we were dangerous. There was every reason to cut things off before they ever got to that point, before I could lose control.

  “Look, Elodie, I don’t know what kind of fucked up information you’ve been living with, but there’s no reason to kill yourself because of this. What you’re experiencing is perfectly normal for a werewolf. You’ll go through transition and then you learn to control it. You won’t be a danger.”

  It was almost like he was in my head, reading my jumbled thoughts. A frightening prospect in and of itself. But what he was saying, what he was offering . . .

  “It can’t be true,” I whispered.

  “Why is it so hard for you to just accept this?” He actually shook me, his voice snapping with frustration.

  “Because it invalidates my entire family history! It makes every goddamned piece senseless and horrible,” I shouted. “Because it means that eighteen bright, vivacious women died for nothing. Suffered for nothing.”

  The frustration left his face, replaced with a dawning realization. “Not just them, but you.”

  I jerked free of his hands and spun to pace. “Yes, me. If I believe you, then everything I’ve done, everything I’ve sacrificed and denied myself meant nothing. I’ve lived this way for nothing. My whole life, I’ve tortured myself for nothing. I might have killed myself for nothing.” Oh my head ached. I shoved both hands in my hair, gripping, pulling, I didn’t know which. I just wanted the pain to go away. All of it.

  “Just believe what I’m telling you, and all that stops. Just believe me and put all that behind you.” The calm, reasonable tone cut like a knife, through my beliefs, through my fears. And just like the knife, I shied away from it.

  It’s not that simple.

  “Yes, it is that simple.”

  Something burst inside me. Whatever dam I’d built to hold back the tide of emotion so I could keep moving, keep functioning, simply shattered. My legs buckled. I started to fall, but Sawyer caught me, taking my weight, tucking me close as the full body quakes hit. I shook so hard in his embrace I wondered that I didn’t break. My chest felt tight, my throat raw, and I couldn’t breathe. I realized I was crying. Great, wracking sobs, without making a sound. A silent sort of scream while my world completely imploded.

  In a nuclear explosion, after the blinding flash of light, there is a shock wave that wipes out everything in its path before the accompanying sound ever catches up. For that span of time, it’s like the world is deaf because the shock travels faster than the speed of sound. Silent destruction. I don’t know how long I was caught up in my own shock wave before I realized that Sawyer, currently the only solid thing in my reality, was speaking.

  I couldn’t understand words at first. Didn’t try. It was easier to focus on his tone and stay curled into a ball around the center of my pain. The rumble of his voice vibrated into my cheek, my side, everywhere I pressed against his chest, until degree by bare degree, my body began to unknot. The shaking began to ease. And my ears started to work again.

  “You’re not alone anymore,” he whispered into my hair. “I’m here.”

  I lay still against him. Listening.

  He kept saying it, over and over. And it was the most beautiful, wonderful thing I’d ever heard. Screw poetry.

  I opened my eyes. We were on the floor, with me cradled in Sawyer’s lap. Somewhere along the way I’d dropped the flashlight. It was pointed off toward the back of the cave, so when I lifted my head, his face was in shadow. The eyes that studied me now were brown, no longer wolfish. He ran a hand down the length of my hair.

  “Hey,” he said softly. One corner of his mouth crooked in a smile. “Welcome back.”

  My hand shook when I reached out to touch his cheek. I was so far beyond exhaustion it wasn’t even funny. But I feathered my fingers along his jaw, brushing the unsmiling corner of his mouth, which curved in response.

  I wanted to say something to express my gratitude for what he’d done, for his persistence and his belief in me. For changing my life. For saving my life. But I couldn’t think of the words. So I kissed him instead.

  Just the barest brush of lips. Almost as if part of me was afraid he would disappear if I pressed too hard. As if I’d find out this was all a dream. But his hand slid up my back and into my hair and he pressed closer. Not a demand, just . . . solid and real. His mouth slanted over mine and I lost myself, happy, for once, not to have a plan or know what comes next. Just content to be here, with him.

  Eventually he broke away, brushing the hair back from my face, tracing his thumb over my lower lip. “One of these days I’m going to kiss you when you’re not crying.”

  I choked out a laugh. “I’m sorry.”

  He pressed another kiss to my temple and ran a hand down the length of my back. I found myself arching into his touch, comforted.

  “I propose we get more comfortable for the Q and A portion of this program.”

  It occurred to me then that he was sitting on the floor of the cave with no back support.

  “Oh! Yeah.”

  I wish I could say I scrambled up, but the truth was my legs were wobbly as a newborn foal’s. It took a couple of attempts. Sawyer was the one who grabbed the sleeping bags and headed for the alcove in the back. He was already unzipping his when I picked up and redirected the flash light

  “What are you doing?”

  “While you had the good sense to bring a mid-weight sleeping bag in which you will not roast alive, I grabbed what was immediately available. I’m from Montana, remember? This puppy is for sub-zero temps. Which kind of sucks in Tennessee, except that it means more padding.”

  “Oh.”

  He flipped it out, then reached for mine to do the same. Crawling to the middle, he stretched out and patted the space beside him. “C’mon. I don’t bite. Usually.” He flashed a cheeky smile.

  I really should not have had the mental energy left for the thoughts that remark conjured. To hide my embarrassment, I knelt to untie my boots. I stepped out of them and stripped off my socks, wincing as my bare feet hit the hard floor. With luck this miraculous sped up healing would clear
up those stone bruises and cuts by the time I woke up tomorrow. Today. Whatever.

  I tried not to think too hard as I crawled across the sleeping bags into Sawyer’s open arms. Too much had passed between us tonight for this to be awkward. If he was okay with the fact that I’d just totally fallen apart, I wasn’t going to question it. So I snuggled in, as I’d often dreamed of doing, and he tugged me even closer, tangling our legs. It felt so freaking good to be off my feet, I nearly moaned. His chest was warm beneath my cheek and surprisingly smooth. I totally would have expected a werewolf boy to be really hairy. Thankfully I had enough brain cells left to prevent myself from voicing that observation out loud.

  “So you’re . . . ” I didn’t even know how to ask the question.

  “A wolf. Like you. Yes.”

  More mental implosions. Sawyer was my wolf. The wolf who had risked his life to save me last night. The wolf who had bled in my kitchen. As billboards for interest and affection go, those were pretty damned big ones.

  “I never . . . I didn’t even think . . . ”

  “Don’t tell me that brilliant brain of yours rejected the notion of a curse in favor of genetics and never went beyond that to think that there were more of us.”

  “More?” I said faintly, my brain drawn back to the impossible situation in which I found myself. Not the last. After all the isolation, the notion that there were more just didn’t seem possible.

  “Sure. I mean, we’re not, like, rampant, but there are pockets of us here and there. At least a few hundred across North America.”

  The rumble of his voice against my cheek tied pleasant knots in my belly.

  “A few hundred?” I squeaked.

  “Sure. Dad could tell you more about it than I can. He’s always been more interested than me.”

  “Wait, your dad? Then you didn’t inherit this from your mother?”

  “From both of them. Which is the normal way of things. The fact that you come from a lengthy matrilineal line with human fathers is nothing short of . . . miraculous. I’ve never actually heard of that before. And it probably explains some of your quirks.”

  “Quirks?”

  “Why I didn’t know right off what you were. I should’ve been able to smell you. Though that may be because you haven’t shifted yet. The thing is, when we met there was nothing about you that tipped me off. Except for—” He cut himself off.

  “Except for what?” I asked.

  “You calm the beast,” he muttered. “My beast, I mean. The wolf inside me. It’s restless. And when I first came here, it was angry. But even that first time I talked to you it . . . calmed. A—another wolf might have been able to do that. But a human? No.”

  It felt like there was something else there, something he left out, but he was still talking.

  “By rights I should have stayed away from you. Far away. But I just couldn’t. And then I started seeing signs here and there. Little things. Nothing I could definitively say yes or no about. So I . . . Don’t get mad.”

  “After what you’ve done for me, I think you get some latitude,” I observed.

  “I followed you.”

  My body went immediately tense, as if he’d plucked a bow. “Oh.” I couldn’t think what else to say to that. It explained how he’d found this place. “So that whole conversation we had about me feeling like I was being stalked?”

  He was stroking down my back again, trying to soothe. “Some of that was probably me. But not all of it. Not after last night.”

  I groaned. “Okay I vote the topic of who’s trying to kill me gets tabled until tomorrow. I don’t have enough brain cells left for that.”

  “Fine with me.”

  I relaxed again. “When did you know for sure?”

  “Your confrontation with what’s-her-name. You’re not normally aggressive. That on its own would have been evidence that the wolf was ascending, but your eyes were the clincher. I was planning to talk to you about it this afternoon before . . . well before your dad showed up and things got out of hand.”

  I tried to imagine what that conversation would have been like and failed.

  “Do you think he’d really have shot me?” Sawyer asked.

  “I wish I could say no, but I don’t know for sure. I haven’t ever seen him like that before. Ever.”

  “I thought he was going to hurt you.” Now he was the one with tension thrumming under his skin. “You got in the truck and I couldn’t do anything. I thought I was going to be too late. And then when I got there and I heard—” He shuddered. “I can’t . . . lose you.”

  I was too tired to process the implications of that, to think about ramifications or what it meant for us beyond this moment. So I said the only thing I could. “You won’t.”

  ~*~

  Sawyer

  I heard the growling before I was even fully awake. A low, menacing rumble that had me rolling, covering Elodie with my body as I answered in kind, looking around for the threat.

  Then I realized that the rumbling was my stomach.

  I blinked, pushing the wolf back, and looked down at Elodie. She lay very still beneath me, eyes now very wide and awake, fixed on me. I could feel the shallow rise and fall of her chest against mine and the wolf came back for entirely different reasons. I wanted her mouth, to drown in the taste of her. I wanted my hands on that lithe, lean body, to lose myself in the feel and scent of it. I just plain wanted her. My mate.

  Too soon. I shoved it back again. “Sorry. False alarm.” I rolled off her and waited for the backpedaling and awkwardness.

  She exhaled. “Nice to know you’re on guard.” She sat up and did some kind of yoga shoulder stretch that plastered her t-shirt against her breasts.

  I looked away.

  My stomach lodged another protest.

  “I was going to ask if you were hungry, but your stomach is speaking for you, it seems.”

  I widened my nose to read her. No fear, no discomfort. She just smelled sleepy and comfortable. And my scent was on her from head to foot. My mouth curved in smug satisfaction at that. Didn’t matter that nothing had happened but sleep. She was mine. And apparently she was okay with it. Would she be if she knew what that actually meant?

  Her mouth split in a jaw-cracking yawn. “What time’s’it?”

  I checked the digital readout on my watch. “Seven.”

  She jolted. “AM or PM?”

  “PM, I think.”

  “Holy crap, we slept for fifteen hours?”

  “I’m guessing we needed it. You in particular. Why? Did your escape plan include a schedule? Are you supposed to be somewhere right now?”

  “No. I just . . . I never sleep that much. That’s the best sleep I’ve had in months. I actually felt . . . safe.”

  She gave me a sweet smile before leaning over for a quick kiss. I tried to grab her as she rolled away, because one kiss, one taste wasn’t enough, but she only laughed and said, “Hungry!”

  I didn’t think I would ever have enough of Elodie. I snagged her around the waist and pulled her into my lap, pressing my lips to her throat. “It can wait.” God she tasted good.

  My stomach growled again and called me a liar.

  “You were saying?” I didn’t imagine the breathless tone of her voice.

  I smiled and let her go. With an exaggerated put-upon sigh, I said, “Fine. Feed me, woman.”

  She made a beeline for the stuff I’d brought and began picking through the cans and packages.

  “Beef ravioli? Mac and cheese? Corn beef hash? Beanie weenies? Have you ever been camping before?” she asked.

  “First, don’t knock the corn beef hash; it’s good. Second, I told you I was in a hurry and grabbed what was available in our kitchen. I wasn’t taking time for a supply run when I left.”

  “An all male kitchen is a truly frightening place,” she said. “Do y’all eat anything that qualifies as real food?”

  “We are men. We eat meat. I didn’t think you had a fridge installed in the back of your
getaway cave. Plus when we’re out like this, we usually hunt for game.”

  Elodie went a little pale at that.

  “You’re not one of those don’t kill Bambi girls, are you?” I asked.

  “No. I’m perfectly at home with my carnivorous nature. I just prefer not to meet my dinner face to face. It’s gonna be a long time before I can look at any kind of fresh kill and not see what was done to Rich.”

  I wrapped my arms around her from behind, absorbing the shudder that ran the length of her body. “The concept will feel less weird after you shift. The hunt is part of our instincts.”

  “All the same, I think I’m going to stick with fish for fresh food while we’re out here. The river isn’t too far. It’s got good trout fishing.”

  “Fishing, huh?”

  “Unlike normal girls, I’m not squeamish about cleaning and gutting them. I do know how to use this for other things.” She plucked the knife out of the bag of rice, where I’d flung it last night and slipped it back in the sheath.

  My fingers itched to take it away again. I didn’t think she was really in danger of using it anymore, but just having it near her made me twitchy.

  “How did you do that anyway? That’s the second time I’ve seen you get rid of it with freakish accuracy. Did you do knife throwing as a hobby back in Montana?”

  “Not so much specific training as heightened reflexes,” I shrugged. “I can teach you. You’re probably already showing signs, you just haven’t noticed yet.”

  “Cool. Maybe we can do a session after dinner. Grab the camp stove and cook pots.”

  We set up our makeshift kitchen at the mouth of the cave. Within five minutes, Elodie had coffee percolating on one of the two burners and a pot of . . . something that smelled really awesome on the other.

  “Are those spices?” I asked. “You actually packed seasonings in all your emergency survival gear?”

  She gave me a bland stare. “What? Just because I’m on the run, I’m supposed to eat flavorless crap?”