by Noir, Roxie
Chase forced his breathing to slow, imagining himself sliding down the quick slope that had led to the glacier-fed stream just past the tree that had been struck by lightning one year. The forest had always been quiet and cool, an inviting respite from the rest of his life back then.
He crossed the stream, then stood on the opposite bank, his frame pack on his back, and listened to it gurgle. Chase imagined that he stood there for a long time, just listening, the smell of the cold, fresh water rising into his nose.
Next to him, in their bed, Gavin’s breathing finally slowed and evened out.
We’ll find her, he thought. We will.
At last, Chase fell asleep.
Chapter Six
Scarlet
Scarlet felt better when she woke up. The sun was already shining into her bedroom, and from the angle, she thought it might be a little late. She took a deep breath and looked around, cataloging all the things that she’d missed.
I’m alone in a room, she thought. The door locks from the inside. I can turn the lights all the way off. The window doesn’t have bars, the sheets don’t scratch, and I can stay in here as long as I want.
She stretched and rolled onto her side, looking around her childhood room. It didn’t look quite how she’d left it — someone had cleaned it significantly, for starters — but she could still see the room it had been through the changes.
It all still felt too good to be true, Scarlet thought as she sat up, letting her feet hit the brightly colored rug that still covered the wooden floor. She looked around the room, remembering everything that was in there: books on a small bookshelf, a jewelry stand for jewelry she never wore, a chest of drawers.
If it’s so good, she thought, why do I feel empty?
She thought quickly about the two men last night. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before — she’d had sex, yeah, and sex with mated pairs, but her itch had never felt so scratched.
What if I fucked up by leaving? she thought, but shook her head, forcing herself to stop thinking about it.
Her wolf growled. Four years in prison with nothing but a half-hour a week to shift and run around a fenced-in prison yard hadn’t been good for the wild animal inside Scarlet, and it was yet another reason why she shouldn’t be forming relationships right now.
What she needed was a slow, steady, predictable life. One that wouldn’t send her back to jail, especially since the first few weeks were the worst. Those were the Mutathol weeks, before the guards trusted new shifters not to shift. Sometimes she still had dreams about it, and she woke up dripping with sweat, trying to tear her own skin off. Anything to stop the feeling of the drug crawling through her veins.
A bird landed on the windowsill. She’d kept the curtains open just because she could, and now she watched the bird look at her suspiciously, cocking its head to one side.
“I live here now,” Scarlet told the bird, though she wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince of that: herself, or her feathered friend.
The bird hopped a couple of times to the corner of the window, and Scarlet noticed the nest there for the first time. She leaned over, earning an angry squawk from the bird, but saw three perfect, tiny, speckled eggs inside it.
Suddenly, she could feel the tears rising to her eyes, her throat closing off, and she covered her mouth with both hands.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the now-angry bird, her voice barely a whisper.
Why the fuck am I crying? she thought. It’s a bird’s nest. With eggs.
Chill the fuck out, Scarlet.
Something deep inside her stirred. She had no idea why, but she found the nest, the eggs, and the tiny bird’s fearless show of rage incredibly moving.
Scarlet backed away and took a deep breath, then another, and another, until she finally felt like she might not cry.
Then she left her room, the bird still on the windowsill, and went down to breakfast.
Eating Trevor’s blueberry pancakes, she had the odd feeling that maybe nothing had really changed. Sure, both her parents were in prison and Trevor was married to a bear and a human now, but besides that, what was different?
Lizzie, who now insisted on going by Liz, was complaining about her pre-calculus class. Tim was stabbing blueberries with his fork, drawing on a well of angst that only a thirteen-year-old could, glaring at his orange juice.
“I just don’t see why I have to learn this stuff,” Lizzie — no, Liz — was saying. “Who needs to know the area under a curve for anything?”
“Engineers,” Trevor said calmly, flipping a pancake.
“Anyone in the sciences,” added Sloane.
Lizzie sighed, and the screen door shut. Austin’s footsteps sounded through the hall, and then he appeared in the kitchen entryway, mail in hand.
“Have you ever had to find the root of a polynomial in real life?” Liz demanded.
Austin stopped short and looked at her, then flicked his gaze to Trevor and Sloane.
“No, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn it,” he said.
Scarlet didn’t say a thing. As far as she was concerned, they were speaking a foreign language. In high school, she’d been too busy skipping class and sneaking off to smoke and hang out with her friends to even get as far as pre-calculus. It was a minor miracle that she’d graduated at all, honestly.
And now I’m out of jail on parole at twenty-six, she thought.
“Your mom was good at math,” Scarlet said suddenly.
Now, every set of eyes in the kitchen turned her way, and Scarlet felt like there was a spotlight on her.
“She helped me with my algebra homework a couple of times,” Scarlet went on. “I still failed, but not for her lack of trying. I remember being amazed that she could just read the textbook and figure out what to do.”
It had been a long time since Scarlet had thought of their older brother, David. Mostly because his death had been their family’s real trigger, when their dad has started sliding to the deep end and their mother had started drinking more and more. Papa had already been dead for years, so there was no one to stop them.
Sometimes, Scarlet was amazed that they were as normal as they were, everything considered.
Trevor flipped two pancakes in silence, then spoke up.
“She helped me with physics once,” he said. “I don’t even remember what with, but when she was finished, it all suddenly made sense.”
Liz was looking at the three-quarters eaten pancake on her plate. She’d only been four or five when they died, and Tim had been even younger.
“See,” said Scarlet. “It’s not all armed militias and ranch work.”
“Anything good in the mail?” Trevor asked, tilting his head toward Austin.
“Junk, mostly,” Austin said, leaning against the counter and going through the pile of envelopes in his hand. “Property tax bill, credit card offer. Coupons. The housecat sanctuary in Canyon City is having another fundraiser.”
“Isn’t Pierce a billionaire or something?” interjected Sloane. “Why does he need to fundraise?”
Austin just shrugged.
“A billion dollars doesn’t buy enough cat litter?” he guessed, putting that envelope on the bottom of the stack.
“Ooh,” he went on. “Here’s one just addressed to ‘Ursid Bastard,’ care of Red Sky Ranch. No return address.”
“That’s you,” said Trevor. He put pancakes on a plate and handed them to Sloane. “At least it’s not from prison. They have to use a return address.”
“Ursid isn’t even a word,” Sloane said. “Did they mean ‘Ursine’?”
“Probably,” said Austin.
“It’s a meteor shower,” Scarlet piped up. “I think.”
“Ursid?” asked Austin.
Scarlet nodded.
“Meteor showers are usually named for the constellations they originate in,” Scarlet said. “Or, where it looks like they originate from when you’re standing on Earth, at least. So the Leonids look like
they’re coming from the constellation Leo, the Perseids look like they’re coming from Perseus, and so on. I think there’s an Ursid shower. From one of the Ursa constellations.”
Everyone else in the room stared at her. Sloane’s mouth was partly open, and even Tim looked surprised.
“There weren’t very many books in the prison library,” Scarlet said. She could feel the heat rising to her face.
Stop looking at me, she thought.
“So I ended up reading one about astronomy, because it seemed sort of interesting,” she finished.
Do they have to look so surprised that I read a book?
“Cool,” said Austin at last. “I’m a meteoric bastard, then.”
“They probably did mean ‘ursine,’” Scarlet said.
“You haven’t gotten a nasty letter in a while,” said Trevor. “You do something lately?”
Austin just shrugged.
“Every so often the Ponderosa pack remnants remember that I exist, and they get worked up enough to write down their thoughts,” he said, ripping it open and scanning it. “Yeah, this is just the usual.”
Trevor poured out more pancake batter, and Scarlet could see his jaw working, his back rigid. Then he tugged on his earlobe, something he’d done when he was mad since he was a kid.
“It’s not a big deal,” Austin said, his voice softer now.
“That doesn’t mean I have to like it,” Trevor said.
“The people who write those are almost too stupid to breathe properly,” Sloane said, her eyes flashing. “Just give them time, and they’ll take care of themselves.”
Scarlet looked down at her pancakes.
That used to be me, she thought. She’d never written a nasty letter like that, but she had a feeling that she knew exactly what was in it. How many awful things had she said about bears and lions and humans, without knowing the first thing about any of them?
What if I’m still like that? she wondered.
What if knowing about constellations and meteors is just a cover, and deep down, I’ll always be the hateful bitch I used to be? What if I couldn’t actually change?
Scarlet ate the rest of her breakfast in silence, trying to keep her eyes away from her three-moon tattoo.
After breakfast, she volunteered for the dishes, and she could tell that Trevor was pleased, even if he didn’t say anything.
“Austin’s gonna do some ranch stuff,” he said, leaning against the counter next to her. “But I cleared my schedule. I thought you might need some wolf time. I know you didn’t get much on the inside.”
Scarlet would barely consider the time she got to shift in the prison wolf time at all: half an hour a week in a twenty-by-twenty yard, surrounded on all sides by cinderblock walls topped with razor wire. Above it had sat a guard tower, a human guard with a high-caliber rifle inside it.
Human guards were notoriously trigger happy around shifter prisoners. Scarlet had seen them shoot another woman, a lion who’d nearly managed to scale a fence and escape.
“Yes,” Scarlet said quickly. She looked at her brother and grinned, her wolf hopping with joy. “I definitely need some wolf time.”
“Ready now?” Trevor asked, as she put the last plate in the draining rack.
Scarlet just nodded. She was so excited that her wolf felt more like a puppy with a squeak toy than a full-grown wild animal.
“Come on,” he said, and led her out the back door.
As they walked through the back yard, he pointed.
“This is the shifting shed,” he said. “For decency and such.”
“You don’t just shift in the house?” she asked.
“Sloane gets annoyed if it smells like wet dog in there,” he said. “Or wet bear. Which smells a lot like wet dog.”
“She has a point,” Scarlet admitted.
In theory, you could tell your wolf what not to do, and for the most part, it worked: shifters rarely shifted among human company, didn’t murder people, didn’t get hit by cars.
But it was nearly impossible to walk into a warm, dry house after a rainy run and not shake the water off.
The shed was small and unimpressive, just a wooden building with a shower curtain running down the center and two bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling.
“This is civilized,” Scarlet said, stepping in. Trevor closed the door behind them, then pulled the curtain through the middle.
“We’ve got all the finest creature comforts,” Trevor said, half-joking, then she could hear him pause. Scarlet pulled her shirt over her head, then put it and her bra on a small wooden shelf.
“Lizzie started shifting while you were gone,” he went on. “And Tim will start, any day now. We wanted to give them a safe space, where they could go and not be vulnerable in public.”
Once more, Scarlet felt a knot in her stomach. Despite herself, she thought about the bird in her window again, fiercely guarding its eggs against an enemy a hundred times its size.
“That’s really nice of you,” she said, quietly.
In the next stall, she heard the sound of cloth hitting the floor.
“Well, I had to do something,” Trevor said. His quiet voice had a hard edge to it.
Scarlet knew why. She’d been eleven the first time Trevor had shifted. He’d been thirteen. The ability to shift came with puberty, and one day, Trevor had been digging a fence hole in the back yard, before he’d suddenly doubled over, screamed, and then turned into a wolf, shredding off all his clothes.
He’d run off immediately, and the men working with him had just straightened up and watched him go. They knew he’d come back.
When he did, he was human and naked. It took a couple of months to get shifting under control, and Scarlet still remembered seeing him, naked, on the edge of their property.
She also remembered their father forcing Trevor to walk all the way into the house totally nude, admonishing him to be proud of his first shift, to display himself proudly. After all, Trevor was a man now.
Standing in the shed, not at all far from the hole Trevor had been digging when he first shifted, Scarlet realized that Trevor had never forgiven his father for that, or for a thousand other things.
I’m not sure he needs to, she thought, looking down at the ground.
Does everyone deserve forgiveness?
She didn’t want to get to the next part of that question. A single tear made its way down her cheek, and she brushed it off impatiently.
You just got out of jail. It’s okay to be a mess, she told herself.
“You ready?” Trevor asked from the other side of the curtain.
Scarlet swallowed, trying to find her voice.
“Let’s do this,” she responded, hoping that she didn’t sound too shaky.
Not that it mattered. Scarlet let her wolf take over, completely over, for the first time in years.
Chapter Seven
Gavin
The Ponderosa County office of the Cascadia Department of Corrections was a low, squat building just off of Main Street, covered in ugly wooden shingles. The shingles hadn’t been the Department’s idea. They had just rented the building, ugly shingles and all, because they needed an outpost in that corner of the state.
Just like every morning, Gavin considered the shingles as he walked to the front door of the building.
Definitely growing moss, he thought to himself, looking at the green shadow running along the top edges. That can’t be good. This building is literally rotting with us inside.
He and Chase had already had a full day of trying to find Sarah with no results whatsoever. She hadn’t tracked them down, either, and Gavin was in a mood.
He reached the glass front door, adjusted his briefcase on his shoulder, and pulled it open.
Rotting with us inside is probably a metaphor for something, he thought, then made himself smile at the receptionist.
“Morning, Betty,” he said.
“Morning, Gavin,” she said. Betty was just over sixty, a fact that
had surprised Gavin when he found out — but then again, maybe it shouldn’t have. After all, she ran the office with an iron fist, equally up to the tasks of unjamming the copier, catering a lunch, and informing violent felons that they needed to leave, now.
“How’s my favorite secretary?” he asked, checking his mailbox.
“I wouldn’t know about her,” Betty said dryly. “But your favorite highly skilled office manager is going to strangle everyone at the transportation department who cannot schedule a simple bus ride for felons.”
She looked at Gavin, raising one eyebrow above her thick-framed reading glasses.
“Remind me never to carpool with you,” Gavin teased.
“I’ve seen how you drive,” she said. A single wrinkle appeared in the corner of her eye, the sole sign that she was teasing him, otherwise totally straight-faced. “I won’t be asking for a ride anytime soon.”
Gavin grinned.
“I’m just efficient,” he said.
“Sure,” she said. “If anyone ever breaks the land speed record in a Toyota Camry, it’ll be you.”
“I’m taking that as a compliment,” Gavin said, shuffling through his mail: memo, memo, memo, notice, memo. “Anything good happening today?”
“Not unless Charlene brings donuts again,” Betty said.
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” said Gavin, as he walked toward his office.
It wasn’t big or fancy, but it did have a window onto Main Street, and from it, Gavin could sometimes watch people as they looked in. His favorite was when people looked into what they probably thought was an accounting firm, only to see some huge, tattoo-covered shifter looking back. It didn’t happen often, but Gavin enjoyed those moments.
On the walls he’d hung big landscape photos: the ocean on the wall opposite him, the mountains on the wall behind him. When he’d first moved into the office years ago, those awful inspirational posters had been all over the walls. The one he’d hated the most had a picture of a sunset, and underneath the words PERSEVERANCE: DON’T GIVE UP ON YOUR DREAMS.