And this fight with Jaeger-Tech was just the same. If our resolve wavered for even a moment, they were going to get the upper hand. And that was a fact.
I turned my eyes back to Matt’s and looked him straight on. “Now, I don’t know about you, but I signed up to fight because I love this country. And I still love it just as much now as I did the day I joined the Navy. There’s no way in hell I’m going to Canada, no matter how wide open the spaces are or how few of people live there.”
He nodded, pressing his lips tightly together.
“And,” I continued, “there’s no way in hell I’m turning down a fight that’s coming right for me. Especially not when the alternative is to be driven off my land or be forced to go into hiding. Hell no. What we built is ours, bought and paid for with sweat and toil. Running from this kind of thing isn’t what I’m about. And it’s not what being an American is about, either.”
Matthew sighed and nodded. “I know, boss. I know. But this is more than just our lives on the line, or the life of our buddy next to us. It’s about Rebecca. It’s about our mates, boss.”
I gritted my teeth unexpectedly, my eyes narrowed. I fixed him with a long, hard stare.
He flinched back a little when he caught the look in my eyes.
“Don’t even dare bring that shit up with me,” I growled, surprising even myself. “Believe me, Jones, I know what loss is like.”
These guys had all just found their mates. And I understood that feeling, of the completeness it brought you. But down there, right now, in our safe house cabin was the woman I’d been meant to spend my life with. The woman I’d thought had been put in the ground all those years ago.
“Don’t even think I don’t. You’re worried about losing your mate. I’m worried about losing mine again. Believe me, running from your problems isn’t going to fix them. I tried that all those years ago when I joined the service, and do you know what it got me? Fifteen fucking years of heart ache.”
He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing a little, and nodded as he took a step back. “Yeah, boss, I get it. I understand, okay?”
With one look at the fear and apprehension in his eyes, though, the moment of anger seemed to ebb away, receding into the distance like some kind of strange red tide. I shook my head.
Where the hell had that come from?
“Shit,” I said, my fists unclenching at my sides. I hadn’t even realized I’d balled them that tightly. I ran a hand back through my sweat-soaked hair and flicked droplets off to the side. “Sorry, Jones.”
“No,” he said as the guys picked up their sandbags and took off down the hill again to the cabin, grunting and yelling the whole way, “I get it. I don’t even know how I’d feel if what happened to you happened to me. Believe me, I understand.”
I just nodded a little absently, that sense of sudden rage still lingering at the back of my mind like a crimson fog. Work, that’s what I needed. I needed some way to burn this energy off, to get my focus back on the goal.
“Come on,” I said, clapping him on the back, “let’s go.”
Together, we sprinted off down the incline, our arms and legs working as we made for the sandbags.
As I felt the muscles working in my legs and my heart beating faster, I knew this was what I needed to get my priorities reoriented, to get my emotions back under control. This is what was important. The work, the drill, the discipline, the practice.
But, as I hit my sandbag and scooped it up into my arms, pressing its strangely comforting hundred and twenty pounds of dirt and sand tight against my chest, my eyes drifted to the kitchen window of the safe house cabin, to the pale blue eyes of Vanessa Springer.
My mate. My soul’s twin. The one woman that truly mattered in my life.
What I saw in her gaze wasn’t my mistrust mirrored back, nor was it the love I knew that existed deep down in both of our hearts. Instead, it was derision.
I’d seen that look years ago when I’d told my father I was going to join the military, that I was going to do my duty to my country in the wake of 9/11.
And now, just like then, that look cut to my core.
It was the look that said, “You’re being too human. Again.”
Chapter Two – Vanessa
Looking out the window, I just shook my head before turning away and heading back into the living room of the little safe house cabin they had me cooped up in since my arrival in Enchanted Rock.
Peter and his men had been at it all morning, just like for the three months since I’d been here. He ran laps with his men up and down the back incline, carting their bags and shooting their guns. Sunup to sundown.
Don’t get me wrong, they were good shots and were all in good shape. Great shape, even. Peter especially.
He looked better now than he ever had when we were first together, all those years ago. Of course, back then all he’d had was his youthful determination and his boyish good looks. He’d filled out since then. His determination had turned from youthful and foolhardy to the kind of set in his jaw that made you think he could accomplish whatever he wanted as long as he set his mind to it.
But he was wrong to think peak performance was going to save them against a foe like Jaeger-Tech. The people coming for the wolves of Frost Security weren’t like any they’d ever faced. All the training in the world wasn’t going to help him, his pack, or their mates when the storm the hunters were bringing down on Enchanted Rock finally hit like a force of nature.
I shuddered just thinking about the giant I’d seen at their facility hidden in the woods of Oregon. I didn’t care if Peter thought I was exaggerating about his size. I saw him with my own two eyes that night, felt the blood rushing in my ears as I raced through the deserted, institutional feeling halls of the Jaeger-Tech facilities. I could still feel the vibration of his footfalls as he came chasing after me, shouting at me about how he only wanted to play.
He was eight feet tall, six hundred or more pounds. A true giant of a man that made Andre or a grizzly bear seem tiny in comparison. The fact that Peter thought a gun could take down a monster like that just baffled me. I didn’t know if it was because he didn’t believe me or if he thought he knew better. But I knew what I saw.
I sat down on the couch in the little living room and cracked my book open, silently grateful for the shooting to be over. Being up here had been like living in a war zone, but it was bearable now that the only thing I heard were the sound of their grunts and war cries drifting down the mountain.
I tried to focus on my book, one I’d pulled down from one of the many bookshelves Peter had filled the cabin’s living room with, but the words just seemed to dance meaninglessly on the page in front of me. Try as I might, they seemed to flit before my eyes, escaping my ability to capture and contain them, to understand and process them. I closed the book and slapped it down on my thighs, staring out the front window at the majesty of the Rocky Mountains that seemed to rise around us like leviathans.
I wasn’t sure which hurt more—that Peter was being so stand-offish, even after we’d reunited after so long, that he didn’t believe me or what I was trying to tell him, or that what his father had told me all those years ago seemed to be true. That he had left the shifter ways behind him.
When I’d found the box of surveillance information at the Jaeger-Tech facility all those months ago, I’d been amazed to read that Peter was the alpha of his own pack. Back when we’d just been more children than adults, he’d run off to join the military, leaving us all behind. His father had told us all that his son had shirked his responsibility, that he’d said he wanted nothing to do with other shifters ever again.
But even now it was hard to see how his father had been lying. Here he was, trying to face a threat head-on by pushing aside the old ways. They should have been running around here as wolves, not as men. Fighting like a pack, learning how to encircle their foes and bring men down by their throats, not with little pieces of metal they shot from the barrels of their guns.
More importantly, Peter should have been learning from me how to control his true power—the kind of power that was only whispered about by old women who told the stories of our past around campfires in the deepest parts of the world. The stories of the hybrid, of the true werewolves that alphas could become. Upright, powerful creatures, half-wolf and half-man, that could run faster than a man or any wolf, could tear through steel with their claws. Powerful beings that were impervious to injury.
But he didn’t want any of it.
Instead, he called it all a fairytale. An old legend that not even his father had believed in. Nothing more than myths and folklore told to shifter pups as they were first learning how to control their transformations.
I blinked and shook my head as something, some change, pulled me from my thoughts.
Maybe I’d smelled him. Maybe I’d heard him. Whatever the reason for me to be drawn from my thoughts were, there Peter was, coming up onto the porch and heading for the screen door, a big orange water cooler like they had at sports games in one hand as sweat poured off him in rivers.
I swallowed hard, the smell of my mate hitting my nose. He smelled better than any bouquet of the freshest wildflowers ever picked.
Think of the wolf, and he shall appear.
“Just refilling the cooler,” he said as he came into the living room, eyes averted from mine as he headed past me. “Don’t mind me.”
My eyes followed the way his shirt clung to his broad shoulders and his tight stomach, the way his fatigue pants hung perfectly from his waist and his tree trunk-sized thighs filled out the legs. He’d certainly grown into a man while he’d been away, that was for sure.
I sighed a little at myself, twisting on the couch so I could watch him as he lugged the cooler up into the sink and began refilling it. He didn’t say anything else as I shifted on the couch cushion and set my book aside.
“Peter,” I finally said to his back, “we need to talk.”
“About what?” he replied without even bothering to turn around.
“You know about what,” I said. “You need to learn how to shift into the hybrid.”
He sighed audibly and shook his head, his eyes still focused on refilling the cooler. “Not this shit again. Thought I’d told you my answer.”
“I know, but that doesn’t mean you’re right, though.”
“No, it means I made my decision. Going out on some kind of walkabout with you, some kind of dream quest, isn’t going to somehow make that myth a reality, Vanessa. All it’s going to do is take time away from training, from me whipping these guys into top shape.”
I got up from the couch and went to the little island that separated the kitchen from the living room. “But you’re not listening to me. You’re just dismissing this thing out of hand.”
“I’m dismissing it out of hand because it sounds ridiculous. Look, I know that whoever your mentor was, this Ivana woman, she believed in them. But you said yourself that you’ve never seen them with your own eyes.”
I snorted. “Like that would be enough proof for you anyways.”
His shoulders stiffened slightly and he straightened up a little at the sink, still not turning around to face me.
“You still don’t believe me about the giant I saw,” I continued, knowing full well what I was doing to him. “You think I’m either making it up, or my memory’s messed up. Or even that I’m lying to you.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment, but I could hear his teeth grinding together at my words. Meanwhile, the cooler continued to fill with water, its tone changing as the level rose closer and closer to the top. Finally, with the cooler almost entirely full, he shut off the faucet and began to screw the lid back on, his movements tight and controlled.
“Well, what is it?” I asked his back when he still hadn’t turned to face me. “Which of the three? Or is it all three?”
He still didn’t reply.
I sucked in a breath, realization dawning on me a little. “It is all three, isn’t it?”
“What?” he asked with a start, finally turning around, his dark eyes falling on mine. He ran a hand back through his soaked hair as he glanced away for a moment. “No, I don’t think you’re lying.”
“What is it, then?” I asked as he turned around, grabbed the cooler, and lifted it from the sink. “Why don’t you believe me?”
He turned back around and set it on the floor next to him. “Would you just listen to yourself, and what you want me to believe? Vanessa, it’s absolutely fucking crazy. It’s like you’re asking me to go after the Holy Grail, or the Golden Fleece or something. It’s just a bunch of old legends.”
My jaw clenched and I squeezed my eyes tight as I turned away from him and stomped back over to the couch. I stopped and didn’t turn around.
Outside, the war cries of the Frost Security pack continued to rise through the air as they pounded on their sand bags and raced up and down the hill with their weights, pushing themselves to exhaustion.
Without looking, I nodded towards the window to the shifters up there on that incline. “And you still haven’t told them, have you? About who Jaeger-Tech is, who they really are. They think they’re just some run-of-the-mill private army, don’t they?”
He sighed. “They know what Jake, Lacy, and I have been able to confirm. They’re a private army, as far as I’m concerned.”
“You’re not doing them any favors by keeping them in the dark.”
“I wouldn’t be doing them any, either, if I was giving them poor intelligence. You prepare for the war you know, not the one you can’t confirm. What should I do? Find them Jack’s sword of giant slaying?”
I sighed, shook my head, still not looking back at him. Always the influence from the military coming in. “What if I’m right?” I asked. “Have you considered that?”
“I have.” Peter came up behind me, stopping just inches from my back. He stayed there for a long moment, an unseen presence that I could feel with every inch of my body. “But until I know it’s good intel, I can’t just throw that information at them.”
Throw. That was a good term.
In fact, I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted more than to turn around and throw myself against him, to feel my arms wrapped around him as he held me tightly. In the three months since we’d come back into each other’s lives, we’d hardly touched. We hadn’t even kissed once. But, even now, with this resentment at his lack of belief boiling inside me, I just wanted to feel his strong limbs entwined with mine. Why couldn’t we just go back to the way things were? Why couldn’t we just hit a reset button and try to live our lives? A clean slate, a fresh start?
“They’re not just legends,” I said, my voice low. “They’re real. Why would Ivana have lied to me about seeing one in her old pack, but not lie about anything else that she taught me? Why, Peter? That’s what I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know,” he replied, his voice little more than a whisper. “I really don’t know. But not even my father believed it was real, Vanessa. Even he couldn’t bring himself to buy into it. And he was the most hardcore shifter I’d ever met.”
I sighed, his presence still palpable at my back.
He was so close I could practically feel his breath on my neck.
Just one step backwards, and I’d be against him. I’d be able to feel him holding me tight and close, like he used to when we were first together before he’d left, before the men of Jaeger had come and destroyed our pack and killed my sister.
He didn’t say or do anything, though. He didn’t even act like he needed me just as badly as I needed him. Maybe all the years apart had somehow stripped all the love from his bones. That all the hard years of service, in active duty, of the killing and the explosions in foreign lands, had formed him into a different man than had left me behind.
I swallowed and bit my lip. Maybe if I stepped back, he wouldn’t be there to catch me. What if he instead just shoved me away? I didn’t think I could tak
e that. Not after so many years apart from him. Not after so many years of having missed his touch, his embrace.
So, rather than letting him make that choice for me, I stepped away. I turned and looked back at him. “And what about the man I told you about? The German?”
He glanced away as if he couldn’t bring himself to meet my accusatory stare. He held his hands out almost helplessly. “What about him? You say you saw some giant of a man. We looked and we looked, but we never found any evidence of a man as big as what you’re saying. How would you even hide someone like that?”
“But I know what I saw, Peter!”
“Know what else people see separately all over the world? UFO's! Just because people have seen them separately, that doesn't mean they're real.”
“Then you still don’t believe me, about what I saw?”
“No, I believe you think you saw something. Whether what you saw was actually what you saw, though…I mean, this all just sounds crazy, Vanessa. What kind of world do you think we live in?”
“One where shifters exist!”
“But you’re asking me to believe in Frankenstein, too? How about wizards and witches and, oh, even better, dragons? Think Jaeger’s got one of those tucked away in some hidden dungeon? Hope we can find St. George’s spear on my quest for the Holy Grail so I can slay him!”
I rolled my eyes and turned away again. “Know what?” I asked as I crossed my arms over my chest. “The only goddamn reason why I’m here is because I care about you, Peter. And because I thought you’d be able to handle these people. But the more I’m here, the more I realize how fucking right your father was!”
“My father?” he roared back. “My father? The man who cut me out of my pack? Who never gave you any of my letters?”
“Letters?” I took a step back, the air sucked from my lungs as if I’d stepped into a perfect vacuum. “What letters?” I asked quietly.
He was on a roll, though, and didn’t hear me. “Who never allowed a piece of technology in his home other than a phone or the lights?” he continued. “You think that old bastard was right about me? That I left behind shifters because I didn’t want to even be one anymore?”
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