“Are you really?” I asked Andrew. My attention was far more fixed on their gulping, however, especially when Kage pushed a chunk of ice cream like an apple into his mouth.
The Taco Bell couple was moving on.
Andrew swallowed. “Looking better now, eh?” Smirking.
“I never said you didn’t look good. I’m not that interested in your financial state. But manners interest me.”
“Got the door—” Kage swallowed and choked.
“I know you did. Thank you, Kage.”
“Three bloody days since dinner.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Turned up a doe but old deep prints couldn’t be bothered to get there in time and head it off. He kept skulking around the tent and not helping us.”
“You mean Jed? I don’t know why he’s not been enjoying himself more—”
“Oh, he’s enjoying himself.” Andrew snickered.
“Yeah,” Kage growled. “Hell of a lot too much, the vulture-faced bastard.”
“Is this about the brushing? Because that was not personally for—”
“Sure it wasn’t. Not like it belongs to him or anything. That’s clear.” Kage rolled his eyes and stuffed another brownie-like ice cream slab into his mouth.
“It belongs to me and he happened to be around—”
“Yeah-cua-ee—” But Kage couldn’t speak and had to chew and gulp first. “Because he’s busy digging a den for you and dropping the trail on hunts and making himself as useless as a pup in spring. That’s why he ‘happened to be around’ so much for a nice massage.”
I sighed. “I don’t even understand why he’s interested in me. He needs to be with another wolf. At least a normal one, if not a stranger. That’s who he’d really be happy with. And don’t be mad at him about it. He’s not doing anything wrong. It’s just—”
“Other than lost hunts?” Kage snapped.
“Did he really lose you all a deer?” I glanced at Andrew.
Andrew shrugged and swallowed. “Yeah, he did. Night you were in the meadow and we hoped the bears might come around. Jason turned her up, champion tracker, and there was something wrong with her. Smelled off. Sure we could have taken her, but we all thought Jed was on the trail below when we drove her out. Finally found him back at the tent. As if he needed to wait there for bears when you had Isaac and Zar curled up with you to raise an alert to call us back in if we needed it.”
“See?” Kage snapped at me. “Think I’m making this up.”
“No, I didn’t say you were making it up. I just… Jed may not have realized you were all counting on him to be somewhere. It’s not like you’re talking to each other. If there’s a misunderstanding it doesn’t mean it was malicious. I’m sure he would have liked a deer also.”
“Rather have a nice brushing.”
I sighed.
Chapter 21
We were still waiting by the time the others arrived and I issued a temporary ice cream ban so no one started posturing.
“There’s plenty. But let’s get the chicken first and get out of here. Then we can divide everything up.”
They finally called our order as the buckets began appearing on the counter and everyone—in an orderly fashion—claimed one. Isaac took a handful of paper napkins. Among a few cries of outrage that the chicken buckets were not, in fact, full, I grabbed more and hustled the others along. I asked for extra empty containers and spoons, then carried the plastic bags with the ice cream and sides while everyone else had a precious, if misleading, twelve-piece chicken bucket held to their chests.
We didn’t bother returning to the rooms, as I’d foolishly thought we would. They carried dinner only as far as the back of the Hampton Inn parking lot. Here they could sit on the curb, far from one another, with a wide open view of the lot and nothing but a scrub field at their backs.
I almost asked Isaac for a key card and number to take myself in. I knew better, though. My own craving for an actual chair and screened windows, running water, and air conditioning away from a scorching setting sun and dumpsters and insects was not worth disturbing everyone’s dinner by my retreat.
I sat on the curb like the rest, shading the ice cream bag and eating admittedly welcome mashed potatoes, gravy, and coleslaw after all the room temperature trail snacks. And tried not to listen.
I had to speak up when I heard the snapping bones. Like a bunch of beavers chewing their way through dinner.
“Hey,” I addressed Kage and Jason, nearest at my right, in a voice to carry to all. “These are not raw bones or marrow bones.”
Zar and Jason glanced at me. No one else even bothered to look up. At least the snapping mostly subsided while they stripped the meat as quickly as cartoon characters, dropping bones and maybe the stray bit of cartilage back in the buckets, or simply scattering on the ground in most cases.
A couple minutes later, seventy-one pieces of fried chicken had magically turned to bones and Zar was sitting next to me with the offer of the seventy-second.
“Don’t you want chicken?” He looked at my project of dividing up the potatoes and gravy with a biscuit each and some slaw, but did not comment or reach for anything.
“Thank you, Zar. Afters for you.” I traded him one of the prepared potato desserts and Zar remained beside me to eat.
This drew a crowd, everyone on their feet to converge on the potato servings, but I held up a hand.
“Could you please clean up? Bones in buckets, buckets in dumpster. Then afters.”
“Zar didn’t—” Kage started, always extra fast to notice injustice.
“Zar made tidy work of his bones in the first place.”
I went on eating, now joined by the drumstick, then passed out the divided servings with a biscuit on top of each. I didn’t care about a biscuit, but I wished I could have a bed of those potatoes.
Kage started to sit down on my other side once he had his. Zar growled at him. Kage growled back and hesitated.
“Go.” I gave him his already opened ice cream to take back for him and Jason as well.
There were not enough cartons of ice cream to ration. I gave Andrew his own that he’d picked out, then served the rest into the empty mashed potato containers as it was now melting so much there could be no thought of making it last any longer.
Of course, there was no dinner conversation, but Zar shared ice cream with me and asked if I needed anything else. Worried lest I grow faint from having only eaten a generous portion of potatoes, just as much slaw, plus gravy and a breaded drumstick, followed by a full cone’s worth of cookies and cream.
He and I finished scraping out the quart carton together, leaving Zar beaming, so at least he was distracted.
When our vast fortune was reduced to a box full of PayDay bars and caramels, I returned this to Andrew. Isaac led the way in.
The rooms were side-by-side, third floor, two queens each, and, Isaac informed us, pet-friendly.
I didn’t bring up where I was sleeping and they followed my lead. They’d simply dumped all our things in one room before so we crowded into one now to wash hands and find our bags.
Out of the bathroom, I stood over the air conditioning in the window, looking out to purple and golden twilight, thinking of such mundane matters it didn’t seem as if life or death, magic or shifters, solving crimes or thwarting foes was a part of all this. Just a bunch of English hunks and seventy-two pieces of fried chicken. What was I here for?
Designated driver? Dreamer of dreams? Deliverer of delicacies?
Skill gaps. We were a pack and we worked together because we couldn’t have done what we’d done so far if we hadn’t been a pack. They’d told me that. I filled gaps just like the rest. Even if I wasn’t scrying.
I shut my eyes, so blanked out from the room around me as I stood in the cold air that seemed to only shove the sweat around, that I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Everyone still in the one room and sorting out their own things.
Designated dreamer and d
eliverer.
A touch, a light, a softness. Something inside me offering an open hand.
The wolves had asked for help. So had the druids, the faie, the vampires.
I had said I would try. That was why I was here. But that was then. It didn’t matter about trying anymore. I had to help now. Not for some agreement or compunction. Only because I would not stop trying to figure this out until we had solved it. So success or death lay ahead. It wasn’t comforting, but a solidifying thought to bring everything into focus.
I wasn’t mundane. I wasn’t starting a new job next week.
I was a witch and they were my pack, and I would solve this with them, to save them, or die trying. Which they’d known, all of them, for a whole lot longer than it had just taken me to figure out. I’d asked before what was the attraction. Even Jed, the stranger—now him most of all—wouldn’t leave me alone. Maybe this was it. At least a big part of it. This thing they’d known about me with their wolf instincts since before I’d left in the first place—remembering the shock and denial about my saying goodbye before. They couldn’t believe they’d been wrong about me, about my own loyalty.
They hadn’t been wrong. I had been.
I opened my eyes to the indigo landscape, seeing my own reflection and others moving behind, still talking, arguing.
I couldn’t feel the blisters on my feet or soreness in my neck. I thought of my mashed potato bed and the light touch and open palms I felt around me. Those who had gone before. The open hands of my mother, my grandmother, even my red-eyed tree frog surrounded me.
Then paw prints. I saw the paw prints flashing through moonlight in the reflection of the glass as clearly as a movie screen. The yellow meadowlark flashed past. A wolf raised his nose to the moon and sang.
The rightness of that moment, the affirmation, the clarity and awakening of it was as strong as any scry. Why? The transitional moment, the planets, the dreams, the subconscious working out things in its own time, the spirits? All together, perhaps, with the energy of the pack.
Hiking with them, sleeping with them, eating with them, now all stuffed together in a hotel room…
That’s wolf magic…
Moving the earth, opening the locks, the visions and the trail, the heart and my own greatest strength…
Whether it was a chicken or egg, them making me stronger because of their own powerful energies as vivid souls and magical beings, or my love for them creating the energy, everything … clicked.
The love and magic connection had been obvious in Germany. I hadn’t always put the rest together. I’d experienced the most intense scries of my life while staying with Kage and Jason, at Gabriel’s hotel in their company, and other times with them. Gavin had intruded with his own form of magic, but that aside, I’d still managed scrying like I never had before. And more. The dreams, the faie, the sheer feelings and intuition. When I’d scried for the fox twins Isaac had been trying to find, I’d asked them to chant for me for their sakes, yet I hadn’t needed it. I hadn’t needed a thing. I’d looked and they were there. The ease and simplicity of it a direct result of my own personal power. And my own personal power came from love.
I didn’t need to scry this. My own instincts, which were themselves a form of magic energy, were guiding me, which would guide my wolves, who would take us to the shamans. And the bird … a sudden suspicion…
I reached for my phone, but it wasn’t in my back pocket—where I knew I’d returned it when I’d stood up from the curb outside.
I turned around.
Jed sat on the foot of the far bed, pulling off his shoes, already shirtless.
Isaac was drying his hands in the bathroom doorway. His bag was on the bed that Jed sat on.
Jason was frowning as he went through his rucksack, asking Andrew where something was.
“I don’t know why you’re bothering,” Andrew was telling Kage, smirking, messenger bag on one shoulder, standing by the door to leave.
“In the room with you the first night,” Kage said. “Now she’ll stay with us. So you and vulture-face clear out. Not us.”
“That’s not your choice,” Zar snapped.
“Switch?” Jason was trying to be heard. “I only brought two—”
“Then they’re on your feet, meat-head.” Andrew rolled his eyes.
“No, two pairs. Not two socks.”
“Budge up,” Andrew said. “American telly in the room next door.”
Jason brought his bag to follow Andrew to the door, looking around to Kage, but couldn’t get a word in with that argument happening.
“Would you all sit down for a minute?” I asked quietly.
They looked at me, Kage with his mouth open, mid-word. They seemed to be waiting for me to go on without actually having to compromise their positions around one another by sitting. When I said no more, however, Zar moved over to sit on the bed near me, Kage also, but away from him, Isaac on the far one. Jason sat in the only actual chair. Andrew slid his back down the door to sit on the carpet
“Andrew,” I said, “I asked you not to take my phone anymore.”
“That was in a fit of rage, darling. I knew you didn’t mean it. Just needed your sense of humor to return to you.”
“I see. Well, I’m not upset now, yet I still wish you would stop taking my phone. Will you look something up? The western meadowlark? See if it has a connection to Yellowstone.”
“Yellow bird?” Andrew cocked his head as he produced his phone.
“Kage, I stayed with you and Jason in the cabin, and Isaac in the first hotel. I’ll stay with Zar tonight and, if we have another hotel night like this, we’ll flip a coin again.”
“Could be a spider in Zar’s bed,” Kage said.
I gave him a look but Kage was gazing at the ceiling, then walls, apparently hoping to spot one.
I thought Andrew would have to read for a while, but he looked up at once. “State bird of Wyoming.”
“Ah…” I smiled. “Thank you. We’ll be in the Wind River Reservation tomorrow, then the Tetons, then Yellowstone. Somewhere within one of those areas, or all of them, are our shamans. We need to spend more time out at night. No alarms in the morning. Sleep as late as you can. We’ll have breakfast and check-out late.”
“Waffles,” Andrew said.
“Waffles?”
“They have a hot breakfast of waffles included,” Isaac said.
“Excellent,” I said. “Not too late then since we’ll need them to refill the stock of waffle batter a few times. By this time tomorrow night—” I looked at Jed. “We’ll be in total wolf country. After we meet the shamans, whoever, and whatever that ends up being, we’re going to Portland. Then we can fly home, armed with whatever the shamans know, or can learn for us.”
“Best laid plans.” Andrew arched an eyebrow.
He wasn’t the only one looking skeptical.
I smiled. “I know. That’s probably not what will happen. Who knows about the shamans. Who knows what we’ll learn or the next steps. But something like that. I do know the shamans are here. I know we’re close. Step by step.”
“Going to see your boss, aren’t you?” Kage looked at me. He and I had talked about this. I think it was a public statement he wanted—make it true, certain.
I met his eyes for a moment in the silent room, aside from the air conditioning at my back, before answering. “Yes. That’s only one reason I need to visit Portland. We can drive there in a day from Jackson. And fly out of the city, so it’s not a lot of extra…”
“There’s no need to make excuses for having to deal with your own life and difficult situations,” Isaac said.
“No … I know. And, speaking of difficult situations, and needing rest, I’m going to unwind in the pool.”
“Pool?” Zar looked at me like he’d never heard the word.
“Yes. I smelled the chlorine downstairs. They have an indoor pool. I brought a swimsuit on my original packing list to stay with my sister. Turns out, I never used it. Bu
t I knew we’d be in hotels with pools on this trip and I’m going to use it now.”
Chapter 22
Pool, a long meditation treading water—with an audience, but I didn’t comment—then a real bed with sheets and a pillow and warmth. I was out so fast it made not the slightest difference who shared with me. I didn’t even remember Zar coming to bed.
I dreamed of the bird and the wolves and moonlight.
The sleep of exhaustion and stress coming to a head: having accumulated fatigue over weeks. I was only vaguely aware at one or two points of Zar moving, kissing me, then I woke alone with the curtains brightly edged all around in sunlight.
I’d thought Zar had gone, but maybe he’d returned because I felt pressure on the bed at my back. Isaac’s bed was empty. The room quiet beside some movement and doors down the hall as others were heading to check-out.
I stretched and rolled over, sure it must be passed 10:00 a.m., but not bothered.
It wasn’t Zar. Jed lay on the bed, chin on his paws as he watched me from very close range with those gold-flecked eyes in his chocolatey face. He made me jump, though I should have been used to him by now. I rubbed my eyes, sighed, and disentangled my right arm from the sheet to stroke his face.
“Good morning.” I rubbed over his skull and he flattened his ears for my hand, watching my eyes.
His coat was plush and wooly as ever, with sharp guard hairs, though he looked slimmer and sleeker after all the brushing.
“We need to talk.”
Somehow, Jed—and Andrew—had fallen through the cracks. I wouldn’t mind spending more personal time with Isaac as well—his past, his secrets which even Andrew didn’t know. But things were good between us for now. Jed was the one I was worried about. As far as personal time and growing to really understand Andrew … it might take a while just to scratch the surface.
“Do you understand that when you’re in fur, I think of you differently?”
His eyelids were sagging so I stopped petting him. He blinked and watched my eyes again.
“That’s why I said we’re not a good match. A stranger and a human. We see the world in different ways. Even more importantly, we see our relationships in different ways. You want a wolf mate. I want a companion to talk with and share things and feel connected and understand, as well as being understood. I’m in over my head with males right now as it is.
Moonlight Journey: A Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (The Witch and the Wolf Pack Book 6) Page 15