by Dani Harper
“Okay, so what do we do? We just scared that little girl six ways to Sunday. She’s not likely to come near either one of us again.”
“Not in this form. But I’m betting she’ll come to you if you’re a wolf.”
“But—I—but ...” Josh was right. She hadn’t taken on her lupine form before to help the cub because she didn’t want to interfere with a wild creature. The situation had changed dramatically. She had to interfere. Right now.
Kenzie ran across the clearing, feeling the static electricity in the earth following her the way it followed thunderclouds. Feeling Josh’s gaze too. Although he already knew what she was, no way would she shift in front of him or any human. Not until the dense brush of the forest closed behind her did she call the energy to her and let the Change take her as she ran.
Immediately the world was different. With every breath came a thousand scents, each as vivid as a photograph, but only one scent was important and she honed in on it. With a flick of her storm-dark tail, she slowed to a trot and followed the trail of the frightened cub.
Chapter Five
Josh’s eyes were open but he didn’t see Kenzie disappear into the trees. The clearing had dissolved to become a dusty school playground. Pools of blood soaked into the sand, bits of clothing and shoes littered the ground. A white concrete wall was pitted by shrapnel, sprayed with blood. Over by the fence was a row of six small bodies, each hastily shrouded with brightly colored fabrics. It was eerily silent, and Josh knew that was wrong. Where is everyone?
Suddenly she was there, standing by the wall. The little girl with the big brown eyes. She couldn’t have been more than seven, but she looked older in her red and green tunic, with the matching shawl pulled around her head. She smiled at him—
And sounds abruptly poured into his head: shouting, screaming, sirens, crying. He was shoulder to shoulder with frantic people, coalition medics and civilians, all trying to tend to terrified and injured children. He recognized it all now. Two Taliban rockets had slammed into Salabagh Primary School, and he was airlifting some of the wounded to Baghram for surgery and acute care.
He was in his Blackhawk now, heading for base. The throb of the blades above him couldn’t drown out the sounds from the bay behind him. He’d transported plenty of wounded men, but this was different, this was worse. Medics talking loudly, parents crying. There were few sounds from the children—they were too badly hurt. Among them, the little girl with the red and green tunic—
Without any warning, Josh came back to himself. Took a deep breath, then another, and sat down hard next to the dig in the forest clearing. Among Kenzie’s tools was a water bottle, and he poured half of the water over his upturned face, then guzzled the rest. Part of him wished the liquid was something a helluva lot stronger.
Jesus H. Christ. That had been one mean-ass flashback. He’d had plenty of them the first year he’d been stateside, all gut-kickers and every one related to the attack on the school. It had been one of the last missions he’d flown for Task Force Falcon, Tenth Combat Aviation Brigade. He’d served with distinction for five years, flown countless missions, come under fire and returned it, transported countless soldiers and lost two of his best buddies. And yet it was the transporting of the children that continued to haunt him.
It was flat-out weird to him that he remembered the school so well—he hadn’t even been there. The children had been brought to the airfield in Asadabad, already waiting for him when he’d set down his Blackhawk. But back at Baghram, he’d been helping to unload the stretchers when a little girl had suddenly seized his thumb. She’d wrapped her small fingers around it tightly, looked up at him and smiled. There was blood drying on her face and he’d brushed her hair away from the stickiness. Smiled back, told her she’d be all right. Then the medics had taken her away.
She hadn’t been all right. She hadn’t even made it out of surgery.
He rubbed his face with the back of his sleeve. No surprise he’d had the flashback of course. He’d already been squeezing the trigger when he spotted the tell-tale blue aura around the little cub. Thank God, he’d been able to skew his aim at the last millisecond—because she wasn’t a wolf, wasn’t an animal, but a shapeshifter who just happened to be a little girl.
What was it that Kenzie called herself? A Changeling. Well, Changeling or shapeshifter, something bad had happened to separate this kid from her parents. He needed to check that out, call a few sources, including friends who were State Troopers. Surely somebody had reported a child missing. Or maybe wolf-people didn’t do that, maybe they handled these things themselves? He knew exactly who to ask about that too. Maybe he could get a cell signal up where Kenzie had her camp.
Josh stumbled as he tried to get back on his feet. Why the hell was there string around his ankles? Realization dawned as he glanced over at the dig—he’d been wandering during the goddamn flashback and taken out Kenzie’s grid. Again.
He hoped like hell he could reassemble it before she got back.
Kenzie trailed the cub—the child, she kept reminding herself—to a rocky outcropping a couple miles beyond her camp. There, she scented the cub inside a small cave. She could smell its fear too, and cursed herself again for not realizing the cub’s true nature sooner.
How the hell did she start over with this child? Number one, don’t scare her any further. Then what? Finally, she lay on the mossy ground with her head on her paws. Perhaps the cub would come to her....
She reached out with her mind to talk to it. As wolves, all Changelings could use mindspeech to communicate—surely this little one was no different. I’m really sorry you almost got poked with a dart. And Josh is sorry too. You did such a good job of being a wolf that we both thought you were a real, wild wolf. Josh works for Fish and Game, and he protects animals. We were trying to help you. We didn’t know you were a little girl, or I would have just asked you to come with us.
There was no response. Kenzie focused hard, listening with both ears and mind, but heard nothing. She kept trying, talking about anything and everything, from what she was doing at the dig to all about her family back in northern Canada. She mentioned her niece and nephew, Hailey and Hunter, a lot, hoping that the little girl would relate to them, or at least see that Kenzie really did like children and didn’t go around darting them for fun.
Two hours later, the cub still hadn’t emerged. It had poked out its head once during the first hour to peer at her but didn’t reappear. Kenzie had been so sure that Josh was right, that her wolfen form would be less threatening, but she hadn’t counted on a communication problem. Could the child hear her at all? She’d never heard of a Changeling who wasn’t telepathic, but she supposed it was possible. The other possibility was that the little girl was deliberately not talking to her. Why?
In the end, Kenzie hunted down a fat rabbit and left it in front of the cave. No tricks, she said to the cub. I just don’t want you to be hungry. It’s hard to keep warm at night if you don’t have a full tummy.
A Changeling had extraordinary hearing—she caught a faint rustle from inside the cave, the first sound she’d heard for some time. I’m going back to my camp now to see what Josh is doing—you can come visit me anytime, okay? Even in the middle of the night. She forced herself to walk away then. She had to keep her word, had to do exactly what she said she’d do or the child would never trust her.
Leaving a child alone in the woods, however, was one of the hardest things she’d ever done. Still, she couldn’t help smiling a little when her ears picked up tiny growls accompanied by the sounds of voracious eating.
The fire had died down to coals, perfect for cooking, and Josh added the floured pieces of rabbit to the cast-iron fry pan. They sizzled in the bacon fat, a satisfying sound.
A movement at the far end of the camp caught his eye—Kenzie was back. He didn’t miss that the fire’s glow flattered her as she approached, lent highlights to her dark hair and golden shadows to her skin. He did forget all the things he’d plann
ed to say to her.
“Omigod, you’re cooking!” she said.
“And you’re alone.”
She dropped into a camp chair near him. “Yeah. It didn’t go so well. At least I got her to eat something, but she wouldn’t come to me. Wouldn’t even talk to me.”
“Probably made you feel like shit.” He patted her arm, then got up to turn the rabbit over with a fork. Sucked on a finger when a splatter of grease hit it.
“I could have forced her to come back with me, but that just felt wrong. I hate the thought of her out there by herself, though.”
“You’re trying to win her trust. Once you have that, you’ll have her cooperation.” He salted the sizzling meat. “You know that something happened to her to make her so afraid. It wasn’t just us, it wasn’t just the dart gun.”
“Yeah, I know. And something is making her stay in wolf form too.”
“Maybe she’s not old enough to shift by herself?”
Kenzie shook her head. “No, Changelings can do that pretty early. It’s instinctive, not something that has to be learned. They—”
He saw her stop herself. She probably figured it was dangerous enough that he knew what she was, without telling him all the details of her species.
“They just know,” she finished.
“So how old is this kid? As a wolf, she looks to be maybe five months old. Please tell me that’s not her human age.”
“No, not at all.”
She was quiet for a long moment, and he hoped like hell this wasn’t going to be like pulling teeth. Finally he pointed the fork at her. “Hey, how am I going to help find where this kid belongs if I can’t even narrow down how old she is? Do you have any idea how many missing person files there are in this state?”
She held up her hands in mock surrender but she didn’t look happy about it. “Okay, okay. How much do you know about Changelings?”
“In my Gramma Kishegwet’s stories, you live forever.”
She gave him a faint smile. “Not quite that long. As children, we grow at the same rate as humans. It’s not until we reach adulthood, somewhere in our late twenties, that the aging process slows down.”
“So that’s how it goes when you’re walking on two legs. But what about your wolf side? Real wolves mature somewhere between two and three years old. So how the heck does that correspond with your human self if you can shapeshift as a child?”
“The wolfen body grows very slowly, so that it doesn’t reach mature size until the human body does.”
He nodded as he poked at the meat, noted that it was almost done. “Okay, that makes sense. So back to my original question—how old is this little girl?”
“Somewhere between six and ten, as near as I can tell.”
Christ, what were the chances? Had he sensed how old she was, known somehow that she was about the same age as the little girl from Afghanistan that he still saw in flashbacks and dreams? He ordered himself to breathe, to focus. Turned all the pieces of rabbit again although they didn’t need it. “All right then. So now I can ask around—discreetly—to see if there’s a little girl in that age bracket gone missing.” Too bad the poor kid didn’t seem to want to shift to human form. He could really use a physical description but all he had was her fur color. Did that correspond to hair color at all? At least her age gave him a starting point. “Thanks.”
Kenzie shrugged and apparently decided it was time for a change of subject. “That smells pretty good—is that the same rabbit you caught earlier?”
“You bet it is. My gramma would take this fry pan to anyone who wasted good meat. It’s disrespectful to the animal. Without respect, a hunter won’t find any more game and then everyone goes hungry. The animals know.”
“I guess they might. So you must be one of those wilderness types that can make a full-course meal out of weeds, roots, and berries,” she teased.
“I don’t eat too many weeds and roots as a rule, but my mother drafted me to help pick berries as soon as I could walk. I can make a half-decent salmonberry pie.”
“Salmon and berries?”
“No, salmonberries. They’re like raspberries, only twice the size. There’s blueberries around here too—you could have them every day for breakfast if you didn’t mind competing with the bears to get them.”
“Thanks, but I’ll stick to digging. So where’d you find the bacon? I’ve never seen any pigs around here.”
“I had it in the chopper. Old Mamie Dalkins gave me a couple pounds of her home-cured pork, a bag of flour, and a box of groceries before I left Gakona School yesterday. Said that no self-respecting bush pilot would leave home without grub in case they crash-landed in the middle of nowhere.”
“Makes sense to a point. But bacon—wouldn’t that just attract bears to the site?”
“That’s what I said. But Mamie said that’s a good thing, that then I could just shoot the bear and have groceries clear until the following spring.”
Kenzie laughed. “Spoken like a true Alaskan. And all this time you’ve never told her that you hate bear meat?”
“You have to know her. She wouldn’t understand. Although I’d sure as hell rather eat bear than that freeze-dried camp food crap you’re stocked with.”
Shamelessly, she borrowed a line from Birkie. “Hey, it’ll keep you alive.”
“Yeah, but why?” He handed her a plate of fried rabbit, then dropped a pair of foil-wrapped baked potatoes on it. It was rewarding to see her jaw drop.
“I’m not even going to ask where you got these gorgeous things.”
“Not from your pantry, that’s for sure. You didn’t even have an onion. How can you cook without onions?”
She shrugged. “I don’t cook. I’m busy.”
“I’m busy too, but I like real food. I did my time in the military, figure I earned the right to eat non-instant chow.”
She bit into the rabbit and closed her eyes in mock ecstasy. “This is good, really good. So were you a cook?”
“Hell, no—there are no cooks in the military, just burger flippers and spoons. Me, I learned to fly before I learned to drive. Signed up the day after 9/11, spent five years as a pilot in Afghanistan.”
She didn’t reply to that and they ate in silence for several minutes. Josh was certain he must have said something stupid, although he couldn’t guess what. Maybe she was against the war or something. Finally Kenzie tossed the rabbit bones from her plate into the fire and licked her fingers. “So tell me, why would a military type be tolerant of werewolves?”
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“A damn good one from my perspective. Guys in uniforms tend to like their world orderly and secure. The very existence of a Changeling threatens that. Yet you’re sitting here having dinner with me, knowing I’m not human, and you’re trying to help a child who currently has four feet. Why?” Her gray eyes flashed in the firelight.
“Are you always this suspicious?”
“Let’s just say I’ve had plenty of reason to be. You’ve stumbled on my secret identity, so to speak, and that makes me extremely nervous.”
He thought about that as he finished eating. Hi, I’m Josh, and I know you’re a shapeshifter... . Yeah, he could see that would be downright terrifying for someone like her. “Okay, I’ll do my best to answer your question. But on one condition—”
“What? Why do you get to put a condition on it?”
“—I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but then you tell have to tell me something about you.”
“You know too damn much about me already.”
“I promise I won’t ask any questions about being a shapeshifter. Just about ordinary stuff, like what kind of music you like and your hometown and nonthreatening stuff like that. Deal?”
She eyed him warily. “Maybe.”
“I slaved over a hot campfire and all I get is a maybe?”
“A strong maybe.”
“Fine. I’ll take it.” He put more wood on the fire, then flippe
d open a little cooler and passed her a bottle of beer. “This is to wash down dinner. You’ll have to make it last, though, there’s only one each.”
“It’ll be a treat, thanks. Don’t think it’ll loosen my tongue, though.”
He snorted and sat down, took a long swig as the fire crackled and grew. “I told you I was Tahltan. I was born in Telegraph Creek on the Stikine River, which meets the ocean just across from Wrangell, Alaska,” Josh explained. “But thanks to the bureaucrats who penciled in the border so it runs right across the river, most of the Stikine is in British Columbia, and that’s where I was born. My folks moved to Wrangell when I was eleven, so I actually have dual citizenship.”
“Handy.”
“Very. Gramma Kishegwet was head of the Tuckclarwaydee clan for many years—it’s a matriarchal system—and she has some pretty incredible abilities. I just happened to inherit a few.”
“Like seeing shapeshifters. You’ve seen others, then?”
He nodded. “A few. Anyway, Tuckclarwaydee is the Tahltan word for the wolf clan, the oldest Tahltan clan there is. My dad’s name, Talarkoteen, comes from another wolf clan, one that migrated in from the Peace River region.”
“Two wolf clans? So are you telling me you’ve got Changelings in your family?”
“Nope. Not a one. But we owe our survival to your people.” God, her eyes were pretty when they got wide like that.... He had to shake himself mentally to be able to continue. “This is the story that my gramma told me many times. There was an old man named Xe’nda who led the Tahltan hunters. There had been very little game that winter and the people were starving. Xe’nda found the trail of a small caribou herd, and he and his hunters tried to follow it, but although they had snowshoes, the snow was much too deep and they moved too slowly. They couldn’t get close enough to kill any caribou, and the people would die if they didn’t bring back meat.
“Suddenly they came to a spot where there were strange snowshoe tracks on top of the snow, trailing the caribou herd. The other hunters made camp and rested, but Xe’nda followed the tracks and found a number of strange people standing beside several dead caribou. He couldn’t see any weapons and asked them who had killed all the caribou, and they said that they had. Xe’nda was very weak and fell down. The strangers kindly built a fire near him and cooked some caribou for him to eat.