He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Does this mean you’re okay?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I think so. It’s just, like, an absolute shock. Like someone telling you water isn’t real or something. Or the tooth fairy is! I don’t know.”
“How about this?” he asked, setting his beer aside. “You text Spike back, tell him what you learned, and I’ll go change.”
“Change?”
He shook his head. “Yeah, you know. Change.”
“Oh!” I said. “Right!” I grabbed my phone from the bed and started to send Spike a text as Jake slipped back into the bathroom. He only shut the door part of the way this time, not completely latching it closed. I heard him undressing as I typed out the text to Spike.
I know what happened. I know what he is. Now tell me what you know about my sister.
A few minutes passed as I surfed the news, waiting for either a response or for Jake to emerge in his four-legged form. Honestly, though, the news couldn’t do much to keep my interest. Wars and famine or celebrity gossip were nothing compared to what was happening in my motel bathroom right then.
Finally, Jake nudged open the door with his nose and paw, opening it wide so he could fit his enormous bulk through the frame.
I gasped, almost dropping my beer again.
Now that I knew what to expect, I could fully take in his form. He was beautiful! Sleek black fur covered him from head to toe, with intelligent eyes looking out from his giant head. Panting with his tongue hanging over the side of his mouth, he came walking over, tail in the air like a flag.
“Want on the bed?” I asked in a high pitch voice, patting the comforter. “Huh?”
He whined, snorted at me, and lowered his tail a little.
“Sorry,” I replied, wincing a little. “You’re not a dog. You’re not even a wolf.”
He hopped up on the bed anyways, the mattress straining so loudly it almost sounded like the frame was going to break under his weight.
I nearly leaped back, the primitive part of my brain screaming at me that this was most definitely not a dog, and I needed to be careful. I fought back against it and kept myself still as a stone in one place. Not because I was worried about frightening Jake off, or anything, but because I was worried I’d offend him.
“Should I, like, pet you, or something?” This was definitely a strange experience and I didn’t know what to do.
He yawned and pushed his head forward.
I reached a tentative hand out, that lower part of my brain still shouting bloody murder as I reached out a shaky hand and burrowed it into his thick fur. I scratched him behind his ear and scratched the side of his muzzle.
He panted happily as I grinned down at him.
“Who’s a sweet boy?” I cooed.
He pulled back a little, startling me.
“What?” I asked. “What’d I do?”
He snuffled again and gave me a look, his head tilted to the side as if to say “Seriously?”
“Okay, okay,” I said, laughing, “scratching, but no dog talk. I’ll be careful, I promise.”
He flopped down next to me, this time closer, and dropped his head into my lap.
After a few more moments of scratches, though, he got up from beside me and hopped off the bed. “Where are you going?” I asked as he walked back to the bathroom. “Oh. Right.”
He went into the bathroom, shut it behind him with one paw, then stayed in there for a few minutes.
I was kind of worried I’d hurt his feelings, or offended him or something.
“Everything okay?” I asked as I heard his belt buckle jostle against the counter. “You alright?”
“Yeah,” he called back after a moment. “It’s just, uh, it’s a little hard to sit still when I’m a wolf.”
“What do you mean?”
He emerged from the bathroom, running a hand through his disheveled hair. He came over and grabbed his beer, sitting back down in the chair he’d been in earlier. “Well, like, there’s more instinct involved. Like people and things smell different when I’m a wolf. And it’s, uh, distracting. Plus, I want to run and hunt, not chase a tennis ball or get scratched behind the ear.”
“No tummy rubs then?” I teased, smiling as I took another drink of beer.
He grinned. “Sorry. No tummy rubs.”
As I gave him a fake pout, my phone lit up and chimed with a new text message notification.
“That our guy?” Jake asked, his eyes narrowed.
I pulled up the message and read it out loud to Jake. “Eve stole the package from Kevin, but she didn’t take them to Casper. She gave them to me.”
I dropped the phone into my lap. “Well, at least she didn’t take the drugs.”
“Or do them.”
I grinned. I knew my little sister wasn’t that big of a fuck up. “True.”
“Only leaves us with one problem,” he said after another drink of beer. “If she doesn’t have the drugs anymore, what do we do about Trigger?”
Chapter Thirty-five – Jake
I awoke to a face full of spiders with curly black legs, their long, furry limbs slowly snaking their way into my beard and up my nose. I wrinkled my nose and recoiled, shaking myself as I leaped away from the offensive creatures.
The headboard stopped me, though, and pain blossomed from the top of my head and wrapped all the way around my cranium and down into my back molars. “Jesus Christ!”
“Huh?” Elise mumbled, shaking her great mane of long, curly hair as she sat up in bed, fully clothed.
Her hair. That was what had gone up my nose. I continued to rub my head at the pain. “Morning.”
“Morning,” she replied, climbing off the comforter we hadn’t even bothered to untuck and crawl beneath. We’d kept the heat up all night, cranked as high as it would go, and slept with even our socks on. Still, though, we must have snuggled together for warmth in the middle of the early morning. “Don’t suppose this place has a continental breakfast?”
“Saw a doughnut shop down the way.”
Elise padded over to the restroom, her socked feet barely making a noise as she slipped in and relieved herself.
I continued to rub my head, trying to feel if I gave myself a goose egg with my early morning reaction. Honestly, I was just happy I hadn’t had any nightmares the night before. I glanced over at the alarm clock and saw the time. Six o’clock. It probably helped that we’d been up half the night talking about our lives, about my time in the military, what it was like for her to grow up in a small town with a real wild child for a baby sister.
Despite the pain, though, I couldn’t help but smile to myself. I couldn’t believe I’d actually stayed up all night talking to Elise. It had just seemed…right. Like we were connecting on a different level than I had with any of the other women I’d met or spent more, uh, physical nights with.
I got up from the bed and went over to my backpack, rummaging through it for my grooming kit. When she was done in the restroom, I took her spot to get washed up.
“Doughnuts, then?” she asked.
“Coffee, too. Definitely coffee.”
“Then onto the Lupo Congregation?”
I gave her a nod.
“Lemme just change clothes first, then, and we’ll go.”
I parked myself at the small table, which still proudly bore the sixer of empty beer bottles from the night before, and rubbed my eyes as I pulled my phone out. The battery was running low despite having charged it all day yesterday in the pickup, but it still had enough for me to check my emails.
Not much was there. Peter must have had Lacy set up my do-not-disturb message, and Gen was definitely redirecting my calls to other guys on the team. The smile I’d had since I woke up, in spite of the head-banging, began to drop from my face like molasses.
The other guys on my team. God, I was letting them down, wasn’t I?
The team had always been what mattered—back in school when I’d played soccer, later when I’d been in Force Recon. The
team, the unit. It was interchangeable. On a team, when you were off your game, you just lost a match. As part of a unit, when you were off your game, people died.
Now, the other guys had to pick up cases they weren’t comfortable with. Cases they might screw up. Cases where people might get hurt if they didn’t do their jobs properly. Not that I didn’t trust the guys, but there were just certain things we were all better equipped for. Like Frank was better on protection details, but Richard was better at stakeouts, and Matthew was our man when it came to arson or insurance fraud investigations.
I did break-ins, skip-traces, that kind of thing, forensic investigations where it came to interrogations.
But what had I told Peter before I left?
That I might not be coming back? Jesus. Had I been serious about that? I mean, I got that sometimes what Frost Security did was just corporate work. The usual. But we did do good things, too. We did make a difference in people’s lives, make them a little better, a little safer. Like that night on the mountaintop last summer. We’d kept the Skull and Bones out of Enchanted Rock, more or less, for the last year. Kept them from peddling their bullshit so brazenly. And we saved Jessica Long’s life, Richard’s fiancée. And the life of Ashley Maxwell, Frank’s girl.
I still didn’t know if I was going back, though. I just couldn’t decide. On the one hand, it tore at me that I might be leaving my pack, my unit. On the other, it was nice to have the kind of freedom I’d been craving. Years in the military, years on the force, years at Frost…I hadn’t been able to choose for myself in so long. And, oddly enough, I’d begun to kind of enjoy it.
I turned my screen off and tucked my phone away in a pocket as Elise came out of the bathroom.
“Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
“You alright?” she asked as I stood up.
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You just seem a little distant. More distant than usual, I mean. Anything bothering you?”
I frowned and shook my head. “No,” I lied.
She made a face at me. “Why do you keep doing that?”
“What?”
“Hiding shit from me?”
I sighed. “I’m not hiding anything.”
“You’re not telling me what you’re thinking about when you’re clearly thinking. Come on, you revealed all that shifter crap to me last night. Least you can do is open up to me on some other fronts.”
I groaned. “Do you really want to know? It doesn’t have anything to do with Eve, you, or what I showed you last night.”
She looked up at me, her eyes narrowed as they peered first into my left eye, then my right. The effect was actually kind of disconcerting. “Mom,” she said, “always told me that the left eye sees the present, and the right eye sees nothing but the past.”
I chuckled. “Oh, yeah? Where’d she get that from?”
“Some hippie shit,” she said, taking a step closer to me. She was so close I could practically feel the heat coming off her. And, like that, I could smell the deserts of New Mexico in her hair, despite the showers, despite the changes of clothes. Like it was ingrained in her, rubbed into her skin and bones and muscles.
I took a step closer to her. “What am I seeing, then?” I asked in a low voice.
She checked both eyes again, this time more carefully than before.
I licked my lips, suddenly overcome by that smell of her, by the idea that we’d been up all night in the same bed, but never made a move. Just talking. Talking like old lovers. I decided right then, I was going to take my chance. I was going to bet it all. I slipped a hand forward and wrapped my arm around her waist.
She kept her eyes on mine, but didn’t pull away. “You’re not seeing either.” She bit her lower lip, her eyes glancing down to mine. “You’re thinking about the future.”
“Well, Momma Moon was a wise woman,” I replied, my voice barely louder than the rustling of fall leaves, before bending down to catch her lips with mine.
“Wiser than you know,” she murmured just before our lips met.
It was like I’d just kicked the ball, the top of my foot dead center, my laces aligned perfectly, the ball moving with zero spin as it sailed right past the goalie. Or the feeling of the first case I’d solved, where I’d accidentally helped free a kidnapped girl. For just a few moments, the world had seemed right, had seemed like a halfway decent place where the good guys won, the bad guys lost, and we all got to sleep safe and sound without a worry or a care.
Kissing Elise was like that. But more electric. More beautiful. More everything.
Like this was the moment my life had been building up to. My training in the military, my time on the force, my decision to move to Colorado to join Frost. All those things I’d seen and done and carried within me had led me here, to this moment, this first kiss with my mate in a room at the Sage and Sun Motel in Casper, Wyoming.
I pulled her closer, and we seemed to melt together. Her hands traveled up my back, slipped beneath my flannel, her nails trailing over my back. I tightened my grip on her waist and kissed her more deeply.
A minute could have passed or the entire universe could have burned out all around us in a blazing inferno. I didn’t know, I didn’t care. I guess my left eye was the one doing the looking at that moment.
Too soon to my liking, we broke apart.
“Coffee,” Elise breathed. “Need coffee before I kiss any man like that ever again.”
“Any man?”
She smiled and gave me a peck on the lips. “Yeah, any man. You are a good kisser, though. Beard barely bothered me.”
“My beard?” I asked, raising my eyebrows as we broke apart and went to grab our bags. “My beard? Your curls got up my nose last night. It was like they were colonizing my facial hair with their tentacles.”
“Tentacles? Did you just call my hair tentacles?”
“Want me to call them snakes instead?”
“And now we’re going down the Medusa track?” she asked as we stepped outside into the frigid Wyoming morning, the sun already in the sky. It was a nice change of pace from the valley I’d been living in, and the smell coming in off the badlands was almost amazing as Elise’s.
“I was just asking a question, you know.”
We both piled up in my truck. Next stop was coffee and doughnuts. After that? The Lupo Congregation.
We were about to step through the looking glass.
Chapter Thirty-six – Elise
“Guess cops really do like doughnuts,” I said as Jake packed away his third jelly doughnut in a row. “Where the hell do you put it all? One more of these and I’ll have to go jog a mile to keep it off.”
“I’m a growing boy,” he said, just after sucking a bit of a glaze from his thumb.
Cop or not, shifter or not, veteran or not, the man could kiss. I’d never felt anything so intense as when I was with him. Sure, I’d had boyfriends in the past. Not in the recent past, of course. But, God, the way his hands had felt on me, or how his lips had been so soft, but so insistent. If it hadn’t been for our need to find Eve, or my concern about bed bugs in the Sage and Sun Motel, I would have pulled him right back onto the queen sized mattress and not come back up until we needed lunch.
He glanced over at me, a little smile dancing at the corner of his lips. It was like the smile he’d had this whole trip, this knowing quirk just at the edge. Now, though, it was more pronounced, like Jake had been hiding it under a bushel this whole time.
“That our turn off?” I asked as we approached a Wyoming highway sign.
“I think so,” he said, veering east off the interstate and taking the state highway. The Lupo Congregation was somewhere around here, about forty or fifty miles outside of town.
The landscape was such a change of pace from the mountains of Enchanted Rock and Yellow Rose. It reminded me of home. All the yellow of the stunted badland grass, the vaulted pale blue of the morning sky.
“Remind you of LA?” I asked
.
“Nah. Deserts east of LA are more like actual deserts. A lot of sand, flatter. Closer than Colorado, though.”
“Reminds me a little of New Mexico,” I said. “Certain parts, at least.”
As we headed for the congregation’s church, or whatever was out there, to continue our search for Eve, I couldn’t help but think about that kiss back at the motel room. I was actually kind of glad I’d shut Jake down in his cabin. This way I could go into everything, eyes completely open. No surprises. Or, if there were any surprises, no surprises that could outstrip the fact that he could turn into a fucking wolf. And, at the end of the day, wasn’t that what mattered? That your partner couldn’t hide anything bigger than being a shifter from you?
Oh, God, there I was already, thinking of him as my partner. How had that happened?
“That it out there?” Jake asked out of nowhere.
“Huh?”
“That,” he said, pointing across my line of sight to a little community of buildings off the side of the road. Out here in the middle of nowhere, just like the commune my parents had dreamed of having. A place they could raise their children away from the outside world. Before, of course, everything had fallen apart. “How far back is that?”
“A mile I think. Is that the turnoff coming up?”
He was already pushing the brakes and downshifting the pickup as we approached the dirt road. He turned off onto it, the tires crunching over the gravel and rocks, kicking up a plume of dust behind us as we bounced over the ruts and dips.
“Think we’re going to have a warm welcome when we arrive?” he asked.
“Want me to be honest or optimistic?”
“Follow your bliss.”
“I don’t think they’re going to like us coming in to pick up Eve. I’ve watched the documentaries, places like this don’t want people to leave.”
“That’s what I was worried you were going to say.”
We trekked down the long road, never taking a twist or turn as we headed through the grasslands that flanked us on either side. In the distance, a barbed wire fence appeared. The gate that would have normally blocked it was open, though, and the road led straight through, taking its first turn as it headed off in the direction of the set of buildings we’d seen from the highway.
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