Erin grinned back at her. “But tonight the moon’s almost full and the mountains look even more gorgeous than usual. I thought you might want to take the long way home and check out the scenic route. I even brought tea.” She held out a shiny little coffee mug and a small white paper bag. “And chocolate.”
“You do think of everything.” Becca helped herself to a small piece of the chocolate and gulped down the tea before handing the bag and the cup back. Erin turned away to tuck them back in her pack just as the moon caught Becca’s eye.
She found herself staring up at it like she’d never seen it before. Had it always been so white, so compelling? It pulled at the tides in her blood, rustling under her skin until she was so jumpy she wanted to run and howl. She forced her tone to sound casual. “Let’s walk then.”
They moved briskly, Becca surprising herself by keeping up with Erin’s long strides. There was a breeze blowing tonight, coming in from out of town somewhere. It was full of tantalizing scents, ones that Becca had never noticed before. The wind’s fingers twisted their way through her hair, lifting it out of the scrunchy that tried to restrain it until she gave up and yanked it off. She felt like anything might happen tonight. The thought thrummed through her like a drumbeat.
“Do you run?” Erin’s voice growled from somewhere above her and she shivered as if she was shaking off an old skin. For an answer, she swung her bag back out of the way. Then she lunged forward into a lope that came easily to her. It wasn’t too fast but it was certainly more of a run than she’d attempted in years. She tried not to think about how much her calves would hurt later.
Erin effortlessly kept pace with her as they charged from downtown onto the more deserted side streets, heading for the river. The bag banging against Becca’s back was a minor irritation, one she could ignore in her newly discovered speed and stamina. She sucked in the wind like a drink and imagined for a moment that the two of them were chasing something, something they had to catch. Her white tennis shoes twinkled below her against the dark pavement as they surged out onto the bridge.
The river rapids thundered beneath its rusting metal trusses and Erin caught Becca’s arm to slow her down and draw her to the rail. Together, they panted out into the moonlit dark in companionable silence. Becca grinned down at the water, its rushing length matching her mood. “Maybe this will be the year that I finally go on that whitewater trip Ed was always going on about.”
“Sounds like a great idea.” Erin said enthusiastically. And just like that, Becca knew who she wanted to go with. She’d been alone too long; it was time that she started making some new friends. She glanced sidelong at Erin, watching her nostrils flare in the breeze. The slight elongation of her face that Becca had seen earlier was back, as was the silver tint in her eyes.
But now it felt right, like it was the way she should look. She grinned back at Becca, and even the length and sharpness of her teeth seemed to suit her face better than they had back in town. “Thanks for running with me. I needed that.”
“Rough day crunching the numbers?” Becca remembered that Erin was an accountant, but she always had problems reconciling it with what she’d seen of her neighbor. She seemed like she should be herding cattle or something, lariat in hand.
“Always.” Erin threw back her head, tilting her nose up at the moon. For a second, Becca wondered if she was going to howl at it. They both looked up, silent again for a moment.
Then Becca glanced down at the water and her hands on the railing. Had her fingers always been so long, the backs of her hands so dark, almost as if they were covered with…black fur?
“Have some more tea,” Erin nudged her hard, as if determined to interrupt her thoughts, and thrust the thermos into Becca’s hands.
When Becca looked at her fingers again a couple of seconds later, they looked normal. “So when you were going through menopause, did you think you were seeing a lot of crazy things, stuff you knew couldn’t be happening?” She asked at last. She tried to make her tone casual, as if she was just making conversation.
“You kidding?” Erin laughed heartily. “I thought I was seeing Elvis down at the diner every time I had a hot flash!” She seemed to catch a bit of Becca’s mood then and reached out to pat her shoulder reassuringly. “You’ll be fine. It just takes a little adjustment.”
Seeing Elvis wouldn’t be so bad, Becca thought. It was the rest of it that was kind of disturbing. That was when she noticed the van traveling slowly down the highway that ran past the end of the bridge. Not that there was much to notice about it—it was white with a logo on the side that she couldn’t read from where they stood and that was about it. But there was something about the tinted windows and the way it paused as it passed the bridge, almost like the driver was watching them, sizing them up, that made it sinister.
It made the back of her neck tingle and her knees quiver a little like she wanted to chase the van or run away or something. She could feel Erin stiffen at her side and when she looked up, she could see the other woman’s lips curled back in a snarl. Her incisors looked impossibly long in the moonlight. “The bastards are back!” Erin spat, glaring ferociously at the van as it disappeared around a curve.
“Huh? What bastards? You know who it was driving that thing?” Becca was alert now, sensing some kind of danger though she didn’t know what it could be.
Erin took a deep breath and seemed to force herself to relax a little. “Just some guys out to cause trouble. They’ve been around here before and a few of us had to let them know they weren’t welcome. Looks like we’ll be doing that again.” Erin sent another glare in the direction the van had gone. “Well, come on. I think we better get you home.”
Becca’s lips parted as a horde of questions tried to force their way out. Why did Erin know all these things about Wolf’s Point that she didn’t? Secret rituals, vigilante justice—what was next? Monsters in the woods? But she glanced at her companion and closed her mouth, swallowing the questions back down. Erin’s mind was elsewhere and whatever she was thinking about was serious. Her own curiosity could wait a day or two. She just hoped it wouldn’t be longer than that.
Chapter 2
~
Becca tried to forget about the van and Erin’s reaction during the gaping chasm of time that lay between her and Friday. She’d never known two days to pass so slowly, not even after her divorce, when it felt like time stood still. It didn’t help her impatience and trepidation that Erin wasn’t around and that Shelly wasn’t saying much about anything at all.
It wasn’t like Becca wasn’t being direct, even more so than usual. They were restocking the shelves the next morning when she asked, “Hey Shelly, you know anything about some guys in a white van causing trouble around here? Erin and I saw them last night and she seemed kind of upset.”
Shelly raised one dark eyebrow and gave her a sidelong glance. “Yeah, Erin mentioned that those clowns were back. They’re just some jerks who like to get drunk in the woods. Every now and then one of them decides he’s a wolf hunter. Erin’ll let the rangers know and they’ll run them off.” Shelly looked like she thought that settled it and it might have except that Becca remembered that the rangers hadn’t figured into anything that Erin had actually said.
She tried again and got nowhere. She couldn’t dig up much on the Women’s Club Friday night event either. Shelly practically grunted, “Margaritas, cake, talking, one or two other things. Nothing to worry about, we just need to see what happens. We’ve all been there, at least all of us who’ll be there on Friday evening.” And that and an enigmatic and distracted smile were all Becca could get out of her.
It didn’t help Becca’s state of mind that, silent treatment or not, Shelly seemed to be watching her with an odd expression every time she looked up. Almost like she thought she might go postal or something. Her nerves twitched until Becca thought she’d climb out of her own skin.
She even thought about calling Ed. Of course, they hadn’t spoken in months and it wasn’
t like they were friends or anything like that. It was hard to get over being dumped for a woman half her age, after all, plus it wasn’t like their communication had been that great before they split. But at least she knew what she was dealing with when it came to him.
He’d tell her she was just imagining things, like he always did. Then he’d rag on her about her weight and how she’d let herself go. Then maybe after that, he’d offer to come by and work on the house. And she’d get pissed off at him and stop talking to him again for a few more months. It was the same pattern they’d had for a couple of years and it was crappy, but at least it was something that felt normal.
But she really didn’t want the same old, same old, not this time. She realized that. It was all different now. Now there were moonlit nights and runs through the trees and winds full of scents she’d never noticed before. And an intriguing neighbor she wanted to get to know better. Calling Ed dropped off the list of possibilities.
She thought briefly about calling someone else, family or friends, but she didn’t have much family left, not that she was close to, anyway. This wasn’t the sort of thing her cousins in Mountainview would get. That much she was sure about. As for friends, most of those would be there on Friday night so she could talk to them then.
Instead, she’d tried to fill the time by stopping by the clinic to see if they could figure out what was wrong with her. She was helpfully informed that “It was just that time of life, dear,” which she supposed was meant to be comforting. Even going online at the library didn’t tell her anything that described what she was feeling.
So when she got tired of thinking about her health, she found herself looking up Wolf’s Point to see what else she didn’t know about the town’s history. There was, it turned out, quite a bit. The first white settlers, fur traders and miners, for the most part, called the valley “Mountainview.” They assumed the land was unpopulated until they met the local Indian population. Or vice versa, depending on whose point of view you were reading.
After that, the details got murky. The local tribe called themselves something that the white settlers understood as “The Sisters of the Wolf.” That part made no sense to Becca. What did the guys call themselves?
Aside from that one mention, there were a couple of sidebars on skirmishes between the two peoples, followed by the sudden and remarkable onset of peace. Wolf’s Point’s early inhabitants settled in and merged so thoroughly with each other that Becca couldn’t find anything more about the original tribe. That seemed kind of weird. Why wouldn’t there be more of a record of what happened to them? Maybe the original Native folks in the area had been wiped out or sent to a reservation somewhere else. Or maybe they were still here.
She made a note to herself to ask around and kept reading. Elsewhere on the site, there were a few links leading to different references about people looking or acting like wolves. These were an odd mix of European and Native American stories and she had some trouble seeing what the connection was. She wondered what all the people who had come to the valley had in common, other than an unhealthy fascination with predators.
She did find out that the first mayor was a woman, which was pretty much unheard of in the late 1800s. In fact, if the site was correct, this happened a good ten years before the history books mentioned a woman getting elected to mayor anywhere in the U.S.
For an encore, shortly after she took office, the town council passed their first resolution: no one could hunt a wolf within the confines of the valley. Then they changed the town name to “Wolf’s Point.”
Becca felt something, not quite a chill, more like a shiver, run down her back, followed by a familiar flash of heat. Why was this so important that it was the first thing they decided? And why was she reacting to it? It wasn’t like she was planning on going wolf hunting any time soon.
There were wolf packs in the mountains still, but most of the local wolves lived on the Wolf Preserve just outside town. She’d gone on the Preserve’s Wolf Call right after she moved to town. She and Ed spent two nights camping out, listening to the wolves howl and tracking them through the woods. They’d been beautiful to watch and listen to and their howls haunted her dreams for weeks afterwards. But that was it. She didn’t own any kitschy wolf-print sweatshirts or have any little paw prints tattooed on her ankles, like some of the women in town.
Then she poked around some more and noticed that the original ordinance was still in place. What was even more interesting, the towns around Wolf’s Point abided by it too. She wondered how anyone enforced that. Sure, the rangers did their best but it was hard to protect the wolves off the Preserve and not everyone in the valley thought they were as beautiful as she did.
It was right after that when she made an even stranger discovery. Her search turned up a link for a site called “The Slayer’s Nest.” When she opened it, there was a call for volunteers, “warriors,” no less, to go to Wolf’s Point. Her Wolf’s Point. It didn’t say why. The site’s overall look: animated flaming torches and blood-red lettering, didn’t make her want to sign up for membership. There was also a logo: a wooden stake crossed with a gray bullet, surrounded by an open wolf’s jaws. The front fangs were broken.
She bit back a snarl, her shoulders rising and skin hot with an oncoming flash, and she looked away from the screen for a few minutes while she forced air into her lungs. This was crazy. Why was she overreacting like this? It was probably just one of those role-playing games she’d heard about. But why come to Wolf’s Point?
She couldn’t figure it out from the public parts of the site and you had to sign up to get on their mailing list. Somehow, that wasn’t very appealing. Still it was all enough to tell her that there was more to her town than met the eye, at least as far as outsiders were concerned.
She worried at her thoughts like a dog with a bone as she walked home to a solitary dinner. That night, she dreamt she was a wolf. She was running with a pack of other wolves that was tearing through the forest chasing something she couldn’t see. The air whipped through her fur and her paws blurred beneath her as she sped up for the sheer joy of running, of chasing her prey. A larger wolf ranged alongside her and flashed her a panting doggy grin. Its eyes glinted silver and familiar and she barked a greeting at it. Together they jumped a stream and scrambled up some rocks.
Then she could see what they were chasing. She woke up with a yell, one foot landing on the floor next to her bed as her body jerked its way upward in shock. Trembling, she reached for the lamp on the nightstand and flooded the room with light. She pulled her foot back up and sat curled around her knees for what seemed like hours, her head held carefully in her hands until her breathing slowed and she stopped shaking.
That was when she realized that she couldn’t remember exactly what she’d seen just before she woke up. Becca cursed her subconscious in a very unladylike way. Then she got up to get a glass of water. She wandered into the living room to drink it while she zoned out and stared down the deserted street.
Or at least it seemed deserted until she looked into the shadows. There were big dogs out there, five or six of them, traveling in a group. In the darkness, they all looked pretty wolflike, but she knew that was ridiculous. Wolves wouldn’t be running through town like that, so it had to be dogs. She learned that much from the Wolf Call. Whatever they were, they seemed to be headed for the river and she watched, baffled, as the small pack vanished into the trees at the end of the street.
A part of her howled to go outside and follow them. She jerked away from the insanity of that notion, pushing it back down inside until she couldn’t hear its crazy little voice. Instead, she dragged one reluctant foot after another back to her bedroom and read until she was too sleepy to keep her eyes open or dream about wolves or anything else.
Chapter 3
~
The morning arrived way too soon after she finally dropped off. When she couldn’t pretend to sleep any more, Becca got up, glaring quietly at the light streaming in through the curt
ains. It was early enough for a walk, even after shower and breakfast. Unfortunately. But that might be enough to wake her up before work.
The decision was made for her and she wandered out of her house, still yawning. She found herself following the same route to the river that the dogs had taken the night before. Or morning before. She groaned out loud at the thought and kept walking.
The river gorge was beautiful in the early morning light. The trees, aspen and birch for the most part, rustled in the morning breeze and she started to relax for the first time since her dream. She perched on a large rock and watched the water go by, letting the newly risen sun sink into her bones.
The scrape of shoe against stone made her jump from her reverie, all senses on the alert. The woman who stood on the other bank watching her wasn’t a local, at least as far as Becca knew. She was short and broad-shouldered and had a long, jagged scar on one brown cheek, visible even under the shadows from the trees. Her short-cropped hair was dark and wavy against her scalp and her eyes were hard. She didn’t smile in response to Becca’s nod.
Becca found herself getting more than a little angry. What was with people these days anyway? Who did this stranger think she was? Stupid tourists, traipsing all over the place with their white vans and their attitudes. She could feel her lip curl back over her teeth and it was all she could do not to growl at the other woman.
They stared at each other for a few more seconds until Becca finally cleared her throat and demanded, “Yes? Do you need something?”
The other woman stepped forward into the sunlight, her lips curling in a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Just out for a walk. I was camping downstream and this looked like a nice spot for a swim.” She gestured at the pool with one broad hand.
Silver Moon (A Women of Wolf's Point Novel) Page 2