by Kayle Wolf
Still, she itched to ask him what sort of shifter he was. She’d tried to ask the night before, but she may have been a little abrupt about it. His face had closed down when she’d asked.
It was mid-afternoon by the time they stopped for a break—Helena called their little procession to a halt, wincing as she rubbed her ankle. The tendons were starting to swell up again, and she settled herself on the ground, elevating the limb on a nearby rock.
“I just need a half-hour or so.”
He nodded, looking down the track where they’d come from and then up to where they were headed. Then he disappeared into the trees. That was odd. Was he leaving her for good? That would be an odd end to this little chapter. But within ten minutes, he’d returned to her, walking carefully with a strange flat piece of bark in his hands. She craned her neck to look at it, surprised to see that it was full of water.
“I found a stream,” he said by way of explanation, extending the piece of bark. It held a good few mouthfuls of water, and it was cool, clear, and bracing when she gulped it down.
“Thank you.” She cocked her head to the side. “You’re good at this. Living wild.” He jerked upright as though she’d struck him and she frowned at the way his face closed over. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No,” he said quickly. He was scanning her face, looking for something. He didn’t seem to find it. “You really don’t—know?”
“Know what?”
Arthur opened his mouth. Then he closed it again, his head whipping around as some distant sound reached him. He looked back at her, body tense, suddenly on high alert.
“We’ve been followed. Can you hear that?”
She shut her eyes, focusing. Sure enough, the distant sound of footsteps carried on the cool forest air. They were still some distance away but gaining. She opened her eyes, met his.
“I can’t run,” she admitted, gesturing to her foot. He looked over his shoulder again, down the track—and she made a decision, hoping he wouldn’t make her regret it. “If you wanted to carry me—”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure.”
She ignored the secret little thrill she felt as he took hold of her forearm to pull her to her feet. It was adrenalin, or stress, or something. So, too, she dismissed the way her heart beat faster when he knelt in front of her, gesturing for her to climb onto her back in what Angela and Jessica always referred to as piggy-back rides. Feeling a little ridiculous—mostly as a result of the name—she put her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist, feeling the power in his muscles as he got effortlessly to his feet. Then he took off running through the trees. They made a little noise, but far less than she’d expected—he seemed to have a natural sense for where to put his feet, so even their combined weight didn’t cause too much ruckus in the forest. And god, he was fast. And relentless. Within minutes, they were further up the track than they’d have gotten on foot in three times that time. And he didn’t seem to tire.
It was probably easier to run with someone on your back than hoisted over your shoulder, Helena thought to herself, tightening her grip around his shoulders and trying not to think about how his body felt pressed against hers. She didn’t spend much time in close physical contact with people like this, that was all, she told herself, trying to get control of the places her mind seemed determined to wander. It was just a novelty, to be pressed against someone’s warm back, to have her arms and legs wrapped around such a muscular, powerful torso…
She focused on the wind rushing past, the sound of birds in the trees, Arthur’s measured breathing.
It was getting dark by the time he slowed down, and the rhythm of his running had almost lulled her into a trance. Getting down was a little tricky—her legs had almost fallen asleep where they were gripping him, even with his hands supporting her, and she stumbled when she landed on the forest floor, felt his arms there to steady her. For a moment the closeness of his body made her dizzy. Then he stepped back as though she’d burned him, turning away, clearing his throat in that self-conscious way he had.
“We should rest here. I’ll find us something to eat. Can you start a fire?”
“Not like this.” It was an old joke. But Arthur was looking at her blankly, and she realized with a rush of amusement that he didn’t know what she was. And fair enough, too. Her family had been sequestered away for so long that the meaning of their eyes would have been long forgotten in shifter circles. Hell, she only knew the white-eyed men were dragons because they’d told her. Only knew wolves were silver because of Angela and Jessica. She had no idea what Arthur was, even though everyone at the shifter festival had seemed to recognize him immediately. Not only recognize him—but fear him. Curious, that. He didn’t seem so scary to her.
“I’m a dragon,” she explained. Then his eyes widened—and she saw him suddenly fighting to control something. A few puzzle pieces clicked into place. “No—no, not one of the Mossley family. No. We’re from the Rocky Mountains, miles and miles south of here. That’s why my eyes are gold, not white.” He settled down a little bit, and she tilted her head. “Are you always controlling your breathing like that?”
“Yes. I’m going to get some firewood and food.” And just like that, he was gone again, off into the forest with those huge shoulders hunched protectively around his face. She looked after him as he disappeared into the brambles, exasperated despite herself. Why had he reacted like that? She was curious, she had to admit, he’d managed to pique her interest. But what could she do? Follow him, probably injure her ankle worse and scare away any prey he might find? She had no idea how to hunt. Not in this body. And she hadn’t eaten since the day before—a pathetic tray of bread and beans that had been prodded into her cell. So she took a seat on a rock and waited.
He returned once with firewood, dropping it carefully in the clearing, then disappeared again. Well, she may not have been able to breathe fire, but she could at least get it ready for him. She cleared a space in the center of the clearing as she’d seen him do the night before, then found a few rocks to put around it—presumably to stop the little flame from spreading. She had to work slowly with her injured ankle, not wanting to hurt it again, but it wasn’t long before she’d set up a nice little firepit. Satisfied, she sat back, then shot a glance at the wood piled up and waiting in the clearing. She could get it set up at least, right?
Arthur returned half an hour later with a dead rabbit slung over his shoulder and stared blankly down at the firepit Helena had made.
“What’s that?”
“I thought I’d—you know, do some of it.”
“You’ve put every single piece of wood into the firepit.”
“Yes. So—set it on fire.”
He turned his dark eyes to her—and then, to her absolute shock (and delight), an enormous grin broke out across his face. He laughed—actually laughed!—a strange, rusty sound that, coupled with the goofy, slightly lopsided grin, made him look about fifty years younger.
“You—you just stacked the wood!” he choked out, and she found herself giggling along with him despite herself. “You could light a hundred matches before that would burn—”
“I did my best!” she said indignantly—and grinned as a fresh gale of laughter took hold of him. Eventually, he settled down and started undoing her hard work, pulling all but a few of the smaller pieces of wood from the firepit. Then he showed her how to build a fire, step by step—starting with kindling (some dry bark he shredded carefully), then moving up to bigger twigs, layered on top as though he were building a little tent for the flame. Finally, he lit a match from his pocket, and she clapped her hands in delight as the little flame took hold, first of the bark, then the twigs, then the smaller pieces of wood. Before long, the little fire was a comfortable blaze. Arthur kept chuckling to himself as he worked, and she wrinkled her nose.
“It’s not that funny.”
“It is,” he said, shooting a glance at her out of the corner of his eyes. Then he clea
red his throat and got to his feet in one fluid movement. “The rabbit.”
Watching him skin the rabbit was less fun. She sat back, feeling a little useless. Eating had always been a hobby. As a dragon, she’d always hunted once or twice a week, eating a few days’ worth at a time. Since Lisa and the wolves had moved in, they’d cooked much more regularly—after all, Lisa couldn’t just shift into a dragon and eat a deer every few days to keep herself sated. It had been very odd to realize that humans ate three times a day or more—it was amazing they found time to get anything else done in a day. But Helena had never had any actual need to eat in her human shape. It was just an enjoyable little indulgence. She was especially fond of chocolate, something Lisa had introduced to her life. But now, feeling the hunger gnaw for real at her stomach… well, she was glad to be in the woods with someone who knew how to hunt and cook.
“Do you always hunt in this form?” she asked, feeling suddenly acutely aware of the silence, and the way she was staring at his hands. He looked up at her, and again she sensed that strange wall he kept up, that odd control he exercised of his breathing, his movements, even his facial expressions.
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it easier to—”
“No.” The rabbit skinned and gutted to his satisfaction, he brought it to the fire—and, she noticed with something like disappointment, he sat on the opposite side of it to her. He stared into the flames in silence as he cooked the meat, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d done something wrong, somehow. All she’d done was ask him about being a shifter. God, they had nothing else to talk about, one would think that the one thing they had in common would be fertile grounds for conversation. But every time she brought it up, he seemed to freeze like she’d just threatened to stab him in the belly.
He cooked in silence, offered her half of the rabbit in silence, ate in silence. She couldn’t even bring herself to break the quiet long enough to tell him the meat was delicious—perfectly cooked, tender and exactly what her hungry body had been demanding in increasingly strident tones since the night before. They sat for a long while, staring into the fire as it burned down. At some point, she stretched her body out—and without even looking at her, he tossed his jacket across the fire for her to use for a pillow.
Helena drifted off to sleep, full of confusion … and about six hundred questions about the strange shifter she was camping with.
Chapter 8
He was being rude. He knew he was being rude, he could feel it in his bones. She kept trying to open up to him a little. He could almost sense her curiosity about him growing, but he kept shutting her down with one-word answers or disappearing into the woods. It wasn’t fair to her, he knew, and he was starting to panic about what he could do. It was either keep being rude or… what? Or confront the way he felt about her, the way he was continuing to feel about her, the way it seemed like he was going to keep feeling about her until something put him out of his misery. Like a rock to the side of the head, perhaps. One hard blow and maybe he’d have some peace.
Ever since he’d looked at her, it was like something had been shaken loose inside him. He knew every trick in the book when it came to managing emotion, but he was running all of his tactics on full blast and only barely keeping control of himself. The day before, when he’d run with her clinging to his back—that had been absolute torture. Feeling her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist, clinging tightly to his hips, feeling the strength and power in her body as she hung onto him, the sweet smell of her hair—he’d had to run as hard as he could just to keep control of himself. Being on the brink of exhaustion was the only way to stop himself from going completely insane.
Art had never felt like this before. Never. Like any young man, of course, he’d gone through a phase of having various celebrity crushes, keeping careful track of when certain television shows were on so as to keep track of certain actresses. His siblings had teased him mercilessly over it, of course, but that was to be expected, with siblings. But all of those little crushes absolutely paled in comparison to the strength of what he was feeling for Helena. Was this just what it felt like to be around an attractive woman in the flesh? After all, he’d spent the vast majority of his adult life around his family and nobody else. Even though they weren’t related by blood, there had never been anything there—how could there be, between siblings? (Eric and Yasmin were the exceptions, of course, but they’d fallen for each other as teenagers before they even knew each other’s names.) But every time he looked at Helena it felt like his stomach was trying to backflip out of his mouth. He was a disaster.
And they were getting further and further away from the camp, from the king of the dragons, from the man he had to kill. God, it had almost given him a heart attack when she’d told him she was a dragon. How was he to know there were different species of dragons, different families? All he knew was that wolves had silver eyes. Dragons, it seemed, could be either gold or white-eyed, though the way Helena spoke had suggested it had more to do with family than with species. And curiously, and unlike all the other shifters he’d met, she didn’t seem to know what he was from looking at his eyes. She hadn’t put it together—his size, his dark brown eyes, the way the whole gathering had frozen in fear at the very idea of him shifting there on that stage. Surely she knew a bear when she saw one. But what did she have to gain by pretending not to know what he was? What kind of game was that?
He was aching to talk to her. Every minute he was fighting down the urge to tell her everything about himself, his whole history, about his family and the attack and the dragon he had to kill. Anything to make her look at him with those luminous eyes of her, anything to draw a smile from that sculpted face. But he fought the urge down, every second. Tried to stay calm. Tried to stay in control. The more he talked to her, the more he risked giving himself away. She’d been through enough with shifter males objectifying her, literally trying to sell her into slavery, ogling her body and reducing her to nothing more than her sex appeal. He’d rather throw himself into a river than to let her know how attracted he was to her.
He slept fitfully that night, even though the warm meal he’d cooked them had made him drowsy. Just before dawn, he sat up, irritated at trying to sleep when his mind just wouldn’t calm down. It was Helena, all of it—just racing thoughts and images and feelings about her, the way she spoke, the way she’d laughed when he made fun of her woeful attempt at building a fire, the way her golden eyes rested on him when he spoke… it was pathetic, really. He’d been studying meditation for nearly a decade and a half, but this made him feel like a novice again.
If he wasn’t going to be able to sleep, he was at least going to do something useful with himself. He got up, as quietly as he could, careful not to wake the sleeping dragon by the fire—but he did allow himself to steal a glance at her face. Predictably, she looked like a statue in repose, her hair resting exquisitely on her cheek, her full lips gently parted as she slept. He shut his eyes hard, took a deep breath, and turned away. Absolutely terrible idea, looking at her. Avoid looking at her wherever possible, that was the trick.
He found another rabbit in record time. One could get sick of rabbit eventually, he knew, but it was better than no breakfast at all, and he had a feeling they’d be coming to civilization sooner or later. Plenty of time for variety there. Though he’d left his truck back at the festival, he’d thankfully had the foresight to keep his knife, his wallet, and his matchbook in the pockets of his jacket. He didn’t have a lot of money left, but it would be enough to get her home, he hoped.
She was sitting up when he got back, yawning a little and stretching in the early morning sun, and he turned away at the way the sun made her skin glow and her eyes illuminate from within.
“I thought you’d abandoned me,” she said, her voice still fuzzy with sleep, and he felt his heart drumming in his ears as he set about methodically skinning the rabbit.
“Breakfast,” was all he trusted himself to say. She
hummed happily, stretching her arms above her head and back, and he pictured her with enormous leathery wings reaching towards the treetops. He’d never seen a dragon, or at least, not in that form. He had to admit, he was curious.
“What’s the plan? More walking?”
“If your foot is mended.”
She extended one leg experimentally, bending and flexing the foot in question with her eyes narrowed as though she was waiting for her foot to disappoint her. “Seems okay.”
“Put weight on it.”
She shuffled upright and took a few steps. “Better. Finally. God, being stuck in one form is horrible. Can’t wait to get this collar off so I can shift again.”
“I’d take it,” he heard himself saying. She scoffed laughter, and he tilted his head. “I’m serious.”
“A metal collar that keeps you stuck as a human forever? I mean, I like having fingers and toes and stuff probably more than the rest of my family combined, but being stuck… you’d seriously give up your other form? Why?”
He hesitated, caught by those golden eyes again. She was arresting. He found himself speaking, reluctantly but with conviction. She deserved to know the truth. She deserved to know something about him at least before their time together was up—a thought that pained him more than he was willing to admit. “My other form is dangerous.”
She laughed. “Oh, mine too. Things would’ve gone a lot different at the festival if I’d have had this collar off, let me tell you.” She tilted her head to the side. “You never told me. Wolf? Or dragon?”
“No,” he said, out of habit more than anything. Then, as disappointment colored her eyes, he rushed to amend what he’d said. “I mean—neither. I’m—” God, it felt strange to say. People usually just figured it out from his eyes, and he could watch the look of mingled pity and disgust creep across their faces. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing that look on Helena’s face. “I’m a bear.”