Cold Hearted: An Alaskan Werewolf Romance

by Heather Guerre

  The cabin was small, but unlike the tiny shack we’d stayed in when my truck broke down, this place had a narrow kitchenette, a table with four chairs, and an indoor composting toilet. The sleeping space was lofted above the kitchen, accessible by a wooden ladder.

  I stared up at it, thinking. There was only one bed. And you’d think that, after sleeping in Caleb’s bed last night and kissing him this morning, it’d be easy to assume we’d be sharing the bed. But it wasn’t in my nature to assume that I was wanted, and Caleb hadn’t exactly made any declarations to me. In fact, all he’d said was that we weren’t ignoring each other anymore. Which made things about as clear as mud. With a sigh, I dropped into one of the chairs and stared out the window at the river.

  I was still lost in thought when I heard something scratch against the door. Startled, I twisted around to look at the door. That scratch sounded again.

  “Hello?” I called nervously.

  Another scratch. Right outside the door, a wolf howled.

  “Caleb?”

  A canine whine answered.

  I went to the door and opened it a crack, peering out nervously. A massive silver-gray wolf stood at the threshold, looking up at me with bright, golden eyes. Awareness and familiarity shone in those eyes. Hoping I wasn’t a complete and total idiot, I pulled the door open. The wolf trotted inside, tame as a poodle. I shut the door, and when I turned around, Caleb was there, stark naked and grinning. His hair was mussed and windblown, his cheeks ruddy from the cold.

  “Where are your clothes?”

  “Left them in the truck when I shifted, and then I couldn’t get them when I made it back.” He held up his hands, fingers wiggling. “Wolves don’t have thumbs. And I wasn’t going to shift outside.”

  “Shift,” I repeated contemplatively.

  Caleb’s expression sobered. “Right. Explanations.” He ran a hand through his hair, mussing it further. “Let me get some pants on.”

  “That’d be good,” I said, face flushed.

  He grinned and then turned away from me to rummage through his bag. He pulled on a pair of gray sweatpants. I returned to my chair at the table, and Caleb pulled out the one across from me. He hadn’t put a shirt on, and his broad, muscular, hairy chest was immensely distracting. It took all my effort to keep my eyes on his face.

  “So,” he said, rubbing at his beard. “I don’t know where to start.”

  “You’re a werewolf,” I said, “Start there.”

  He nodded. “We call our kind wolf-kin. Here in the Valley, our pack is the Teekkonlit. It is what neighboring tribes called the First People of our pack. It means ‘wolfskin.’ Wolf-kin from other parts of the world, from other traditions, have joined our pack over time, but we are still the Teekkonlit. The blood of the First People still flows in all of our veins.”

  I suddenly remembered my first night in Longtooth, when Wade had given me an extremely detailed explanation of the Valley’s history. I’d been exhausted and numb at the time, but everything I could remember him telling me lined up with what Caleb was telling me now. Wade had just conveniently left out the part about wolf-kin and packs.

  “We can shift into our wolf form and back into our human form at will,” Caleb continued. “The moon doesn’t force the change.”

  “Could you live as a human and never shift?” I asked.

  “No. We need to shift. We can hold off if we have to—although younger kids sometimes have trouble controlling it—”

  Caitlin, I remembered.

  “—but staying in one form forever would be like spending the rest of your life locked in a windowless room. Technically, it wouldn’t kill you, but you’d be miserable. You’d lose your mind.”

  I nodded. Chicago hadn’t been a windowless room, exactly, but I hadn’t realized until I left how much I’d felt boxed in and claustrophobic there. Thinking of Chicago made me think of Alex—though I hardly needed the reminder, considering the circumstances.

  “So Alex is… what, exactly? Margaret said you don’t call them vampires.”

  “We call them strigoi.”

  “But they’re basically like vampires? Drink blood, hide from daylight, can’t come inside without an invitation…”

  “Well, yes. But they aren’t repelled by garlic or holy water or Christian symbols. They can dematerialize and move at speeds that even wolves can’t keep up with. A single wolf is no match for a strigoi. You need a pack to take one down.”

  A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Do you think Alex is the one who cut my fuel line?”

  Caleb’s expression turned grim. “Now I do. Fucker was trying to get you stranded until dark so he could snatch you when nobody was around to protect you.”

  I was quiet for a moment, absorbing that. Dread settled in the pit of my stomach, and I couldn’t think about him anymore. I turned my thoughts back to the wolves. “So, all of the locals are… wolf-kin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Natasha?”

  “No. Natasha’s skinlocked.”

  “Skinlocked?”

  “Can’t change skins. Regular humans.”

  I tried to think of other people I knew who’d come from the outside and married a local. “What about Joanne Lance?” Harry had met his wife in Wyoming.

  “Joanie’s kin. She came from the Yellowstone Pack. Tom Tremaine’s kin, too. He was a loner before he came to the Valley.”

  “What about the other outsiders? Lucia? Eric? Harlan?”

  “All skinlocked.”

  “What about your father?”

  Caleb went totally still.

  “Oh, god, I’m sorry Caleb. I don’t know why I blurted that out.” Except that I couldn’t stop thinking about what Natasha had told me—that Caleb’s father had ditched their family when he was a kid, and that his sister’s husband had recently done the same. “Never mind. Forget I—”

  “No,” he said curtly. “It’s fine. My father was skinlocked. It was part of the reason he left.”

  There was an awkward tension between us, and I didn’t know how to fix it. I tried desperately to think of a new question, to steer the conversation back to safer ground.

  “He left right after I had my first change,” Caleb said, breaking the stiff silence.

  His admission took me by surprise. “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen.” His gaze had drifted to the window, staring out over the river. “I blamed myself for a long time. Before I changed, my dad was my idol. He taught me to fly—started when I was way too young. I wanted to be a pilot just like him.” He sighed. “But then, one day, we were all sitting at the dinner table, and I started feeling overheated and itchy… and then I was in my wolfskin. He looked at me like I was a monster. Like I’d betrayed him. He thought I’d be like him—skinlocked. Everyone kept telling him that kids from intermarriages always end up shifting, but he kept hoping. He hated feeling weak. He liked having somebody like him, who depended on him, looked up to him. And then all of a sudden his kid had this power that he didn’t…” He trailed off, his gaze distant.

  “I’m sorry Caleb.” The words were inadequate, but I didn’t know what else to say.

  “He was weak,” Caleb said with a shrug. “But not for the reason he thought. Nobody cared that he couldn’t shift. But he let it eat him up. He let it ruin his family.”

  I reached out and laid a hand on his crossed forearms. He looked down at my touch, and the darkness eased from his features. His gaze came back to me.

  “I was born Caleb Whitaker,” he said.

  “Your dad’s name?”

  He nodded. “Mom wouldn’t let me change it after he left. I think she kept hoping that he’d come back. But when I turned eighteen, I went through all the legal hassle of changing it to my mom’s.”

  “Caleb Kinoyit,” I said softly.

  His eyes warmed as he looked at me. “Anything else you want to know about wolf-kin? About the pack?”

  I thought for a second, pulling my hands back to myself. Caleb mov
ed as if he might reach for me, but whatever he intended, I never found out. He pulled his hands back right away, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Uh… what about when you’re in human form? You’re not the same as other humans, are you?” I could already guess the answer.

  “No. We carry some wolf characteristics with us. We have a stronger sense of smell than skinlocked humans. We can hear higher sound frequencies than most humans. We’re omnivores, but need much more protein in our diet than ordinary humans. And—” his gaze intensified on me, flickering with a subtle golden gleam “—we form very strong bonds with… our people.”

  It felt significant, what he was telling me. But it could mean so many things, “our people.” In the singular it could be my person, as in, that one special person that everybody wants to find. But he could also mean it in the broader sense, my people being the entire pack.

  “Oh,” I said softly, wishing I had the courage to ask him to clarify. But I couldn’t. If I asked him which one he meant, he’d know which one I was hoping for. And if the answer wasn’t the one I wanted, he’d feel bad for me, and things would get awkward between us. “I wish I had that,” I said, and it was as bold as I could make myself be.

  “You could,” he answered, the golden gleam in his eyes deepening. “The pack—”

  Of course it was the pack. Not him and me. But his people. All of them. I kept the disappointment off my face.

  “—would have you, Grace. You could be one of us.”

  I smiled sardonically. “I think we both know that’s not really true.”

  Caleb’s expression darkened, his brows drawing together. “Because you can’t shift?”

  I realized I was poking at old wounds with that one, but I wasn’t going to lie to him. “I don’t have a problem being ‘skinlocked,’ but I don’t think I’ll ever really be one of you because of it. Margaret basically told me as much.”

  His frown shifted from anger to bafflement. “You said that the other day—that Margaret told you that you don’t belong here?” He tilted his head in question, the gesture distinctly canine.

  “That was the gist of it, more or less. And it’s fine, really. I get it. But you can’t tell me—”

  “What were her exact words?”

  “We were sort of talking in circles around the whole werewolf thing—”

  “wolf-kin.”

  “—wolf-kin thing, and she told me that there are certain things you guys don’t discuss with outsiders.” I kept my hands perfectly still on the table, even though I was tempted to pick nervously at the wood planks. “I can read between the lines. I’m an outsider. She wanted me to stop asking questions and just accept—”

  Caleb’s expression shifted to one of amusement.

  “—don’t look at me like that,” I said, annoyed by his patronizing smile. “I’m telling you exactly what she said to me.”

  “Gracie,” Caleb said fondly, that irritating smile still on his lips. “For such a smart woman, you sure do misread a lot of signs.”

  I frowned. “It was pretty unambiguous.”

  He reached out, grabbing my hands. The heat of his touch bloomed beneath my skin, as heady and intoxicating as always. “Grace. Margaret wasn’t telling you that you’d be an outsider forever. She was telling you that she wanted you to choose not to be an outsider so that we could tell you everything.”

  “Uh… what?” How does a person just stop being an outsider? Isn’t that kind of dependent on the community? Natasha’s advice suddenly echoed in my mind—you have to demand what you want.

  “I told you that there’s a connection between pack members. That we can sense each other in our minds.”

  “Yes.”

  “When someone leaves the pack, they drop out of our sense. When my dad left, everybody knew. When my sister’s—” he cut himself off. “Anyway, the opposite is true, too. When Tom Tremaine joined the pack, we all felt it.”

  I shook my head, confused. “Caleb, I’m not wolf-kin. I don’t have this wolf telepathy thing. I don’t know what you expect me to do.”

  “You have to want to join the pack, Grace. You have to believe that you are a part of it.”

  “That’s it?”

  He nodded. “That’s it.”

  “It can’t be that easy.”

  “It is. The pack has already accepted you, Grace. Everyone’s just been waiting for you to take the last step.” His grip tightened on mine.

  Hopeful, doubtful, I closed my eyes and with every fiber of my being, I thought, please. After a moment, I opened my eyes and met Caleb’s intent gaze.

  “Did it happen?” I asked.

  He shook his head, his grasp easing from mine. “You would have felt it. You still don’t think of yourself as one of us.”

  Because I wasn’t one of them. “I… I think I need a little time. This is a lot of new information.”

  The intensity left his gaze, and he leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest again. With a quiet sigh, he said, “Don’t take forever, Grace.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The sun went down, turning the cabin’s only window into a black mirror. It made me nervous, so I pulled the dusty curtains shut. There were no overhead lights in the cabin—just a few dim lamps. It would have been cozy and romantic if it weren’t for the crazed vampire trying to get ahold of me.

  Caleb had brought in food packed by Natasha, and we sat at the table again, eating cold caribou pierogies straight out of the container. After our conversation about joining the pack, Caleb had been a bit distant with me. The coolness eventually faded, and we were back to talking again. But the easy intimacy we’d shared in his bed was gone, replaced by the sort of forced friendliness you share with a second-cousin that you only see at Christmas.

  “So,” Caleb asked, licking butter from his fingers. “Why did you want to be a teacher?”

  I tore my gaze away from the sight of his lips closing around his thumb. “I didn’t. I only got my teaching license as a backup plan. My original plan was to be an award-winning, history-making, investigative journalist.

  “So what changed your mind?”

  “Reality. Turns out, you don’t show up on your first day as a beat reporter and immediately break stories about high-level government corruption and political conspiracies.”

  “No?” Caleb pretended at surprise. “You had to start with mid-level corruption?”

  “No.” I suppressed a smile. “I had to start out by covering town council meetings, and changes in municipal zoning laws, and school board elections.”

  Caleb tilted his head, considering. “Everyone starts at the bottom. You would’ve eventually gotten to cover bigger stories, right?”

  “Right. But I was miserable covering the smaller stuff and it made me realize I hadn’t gone into journalism for the right reasons. Those little stories still matter, and the work involved is still the same as the big stories—investigate, interview, gather information, then compile it into clear and compelling copy. I realized what I wanted was the intrigue, the adventure, the glory. I wasn’t passionate about freedom of the press or the importance of the Fourth Estate. I just liked stories. Big stories.”

  “Like in books.”

  That he’d picked up on something so fundamental to me filled me with an unnameable brightness. It took me a second to respond. “Yes, exactly like books.” Swallowing, I tried to gather my wits. “Shortly after that epiphany, a friend called up and told me the school where she was teaching was desperate for English teachers. I hadn’t enjoyed student teaching, but I knew journalism wasn’t the right fit, and Milwaukee had never really felt like home. So I interviewed, got the job, moved to Chicago, and started teaching. I was only a few weeks in when I realized that this was what I was supposed to be doing. Student teaching had confined me to someone else’s plans and curriculum. Once I was free to make my own lessons, choose my own reading lists, develop my own system, everything clicked.”

  Caleb took
that in, and a comfortable silence lapsed between us.

  After a moment, I asked, “What about you? Why did you want to be a pilot?”

  He ran a hand over his jaw, beard rasping against his fingers. “My dad was a pilot.”

  A weighted silence followed, and I watched him without saying anything.

  Caleb sighed. “He took me up with him all the time. He started teaching me how to fly as soon as I was tall enough to reach the rudder pedals. As far back as I can remember, that’s what I wanted to do. It was so amazing—flying.” He turned to look at me, his expression intent. “We’re just humans, and we can fly, Grace. That’s… that’s still amazing to me.”

  I smiled at the open wonder in his deep voice.

  “When I started flying professionally, I was at an age where I wanted to get away from the Valley, without actually leaving. Flying let me do that.”

  “You never wanted to live somewhere else? Even for a little while?”

  He shrugged. “The Valley is my home. There’s something about this place. Most of us have a hard time leaving. Flying lets me escape, explore. But then I can come back. Back home.”

  Home. The way he said the word with such natural possessiveness made it sound like another world to me—like Narnia or Middle Earth. For me, “home” just meant whatever house or apartment I was living in at the time. It had never borne the emotional resonance I heard in Caleb’s voice when it talked about the Valley.

  Strangely, I could sort of feel it. There was something about the landscape, the lifestyle, the people, that filled me with the same bittersweet yearning I felt when I saw the way Arthur and Natasha looked at each other. Or the way Linnea looked dancing with Roland. Or the way Caleb…

  Nothing.

  I couldn’t stop the wistful sigh that escaped me.

  “What?” Caleb asked.

  I hesitated for a second, then decided, what the hell. “I wish I had that,” I admitted. “I want to have that here. I really do.”

  Caleb’s gaze sharpened, his posture tense. “Then choose it, Grace. If you love it here, then choose to be part of it.”