by E. A. Copen
I jumped at a loud smack behind me as a picture frame tumbled off the dresser and onto the floor where it shattered, sending glass everywhere. I gave the area near the dresser a good, hard look using my aura sight. If there was a spirit or ghost of any kind lurking about, that would let me see it. There was nothing but a broken picture.
I sucked in a deep breath. There was no way that picture frame could have moved on its own. Nothing I did would have made it jump two feet off the edge of the dresser. Still, I couldn’t find whatever was responsible, and I was standing in the home of a now-deceased Shoshone medicine man. Who knew what kind of weird stuff he had hiding in his room? Perhaps this was par for the course of Chanter’s abode. I walked over to pick up the picture and have a look. Maybe that would tell me more.
It was an old family photo. Chanter and his wife Silvia stood smiling in the back, while a younger, happier Nina smiled in front. Next to her but still distant was Sal. He must have been fourteen or fifteen in the picture. Even back then, he looked like he had a bone to pick with the world. There was a darkness in his eyes that had never completely left him.
Silvia was the most striking presence in the picture, as she must have been in Chanter’s life. What I knew about the woman was sparse, pieced together from stories Sal had told me and things Chanter had mentioned in passing. A first-generation Mexican-American, she traced her roots back to a native group somewhere in Mexico. Aztec or Mayan, I could never remember which. Dark and beautiful, it was clear that Nina had gotten her natural beauty from her mother. She had a smile akin to Mona Lisa’s: enigmatic, knowing and yet somehow playful.
I moved my finger along the side of the photograph and accidentally caught it against a tiny shard of glass still attached to the frame. The pain registered immediately, and I cursed before pulling my finger up to look at it. Blood raced down from a slice on the pad of my pointer finger and fell in droplets to the floor. I cursed again and stuck the finger in my mouth.
“About time,” said a strained but quiet voice behind me.
I turned around very slowly. Standing on the other side of the bed was a younger, more muscular, and healthier face that matched the image in the photograph I’d just been holding. He raised a hand and offered me a sly smile. “How,” he said, mimicking the stereotypical Indians of film and TV.
My eyes widened. The picture frame crashed to the floor and broke into three pieces. “Holy shit,” I screamed. “Chanter?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chanter was dead. The pack knew it, the doctors knew it, and I knew it. The image standing in front of me couldn’t possibly have been Chanter, at least not the Chanter I knew. This one couldn’t have been older than forty. The deep laugh lines that mapped his face were fledgling wrinkles. His arms and chest were much more filled out than I had ever seen Chanter’s. I don’t normally drool over men’s hair, but this version of Chanter had long, smooth braids of black and glowing silver. It couldn’t be Chanter, and yet I knew it was.
My heart dropped into my stomach. Either I was experiencing a strange form of grief or I was staring at Chanter’s ghost. If he was here, it meant something was very wrong.
“Something is very wrong,” Chanter said as if he’d been reading my thoughts. “But there isn’t much time. You must listen now, girl. Hear without hearing and see without sight. Speak without words.”
Cryptic medicine man language. Great. It seemed that only got worse with death.
“You’ll have to give me more than that to go on, Chanter,” I said quietly, afraid I would scare him away. “Sal needs help. If I don’t stop him, he’s going to make a huge mistake. He probably doesn’t even know he’s about to do it.”
“The wolf feels deep pain. To show it is to admit weakness.” He pointed at me.
“I know,” I said, nodding. “But if he kills Valentino or the men who…” I choked a little. “…The people who shot Hunter. If he kills them, I’m afraid he’ll be gone.”
“Coyote is a trickster. He wears the skin of a wolf. A strong wolf should know better. He knows his own kind. And yet the boy follows.” He shook his head.
I wasn’t sure what he was trying to tell me. Ghosts can be like that sometimes. Most aren’t even aware that they’re dead because death has no sense of time or space. It also probably provides perspective the living couldn’t hope to grasp. Add to that the trauma of being a disembodied spirit, acknowledging your own death and the strain of manifesting, and it leads to a lot of garbled, cryptic sounding speech. In life, Chanter was good at the enigmatic Indian thing. In death, he was a master.
“Tell me what to do to help him,” I urged.
“Listen.”
When he spoke, my jaw snapped shut, and I sank down onto the bed in an attentive pose. He’d thrown alpha magick behind his speech. I didn’t even know ghosts could use magick, let alone affect me with it. I was still learning which bits of werewolf magick could affect me and what couldn’t. Chanter had tried before to use it on me, but I’d never had such a strong response.
“The answers you seek are in that letter, but it’s not enough. You need her bones. Drink the dust. Take the fever and you will see it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. The effort to speak was incredible, and moving my jaw hurt.
“The letter!” He pointed emphatically to the floor.
I looked down at my feet. The envelope bearing my name was under my right foot. Glass crunched as I bent down to retrieve it, but I was careful this time and avoided cutting myself. Without looking up at Chanter, I slid my finger under the flap of the envelope, breaking the seal. There was a handwritten, one-page note inside that I unfolded with shaky fingers.
Instead of the heartfelt and revealing letter I expected, I found a recipe for what looked like a cannabis-infused chai latte. It was especially strange, considering Chanter’s strong dislike of fancy drinks. He didn’t even take cream or sugar in his coffee.
I looked up, my mind racing with questions, but Chanter’s ghost was gone. I was alone in his bedroom with a broken picture frame, a fresh bloodstain on the floor, and a recipe for fancy pot-laced yuppie tea. Desperate to get an explanation or maybe just to see him again, I tried the room with my auric sight and didn’t find anything out of place. Even when I reached out with my power in search of his, all I found was an empty room.
Maybe he was gone forever. It was a rare thing for ghosts to hang out once they’d completed their business. Maybe handing me this recipe—however odd it was—had been his.
No, I thought. I couldn’t buy that. Not with everything else going on. This couldn’t just be about a recipe. I had to stop and think about what he’d said. Hear without hearing and see without sight. That was the first thing. He’d spoken as if doing so would make his instructions clearer, but I couldn’t exactly turn off my senses. Or did I? Before doing a thorough aura reading of a room, I had to do just that, entering a state of altered consciousness that left me aware only of magickal energies in the room. But how was doing that going to help me understand his strange instructions?
The roar of motorcycles and the familiar, trembling rattle of Chanter’s truck pulling into the driveway forced me out of my own mind and back into the present. I stepped over the broken picture frame, tucking the envelope and recipe into my pocket, and rushed to the living room window. Istaqua and Flash had pulled into Chanter’s driveway while Sal sat behind the wheel of the truck. Bran sat in the bed of the truck, guarding two people with black pillowcases tied over their heads. Plastic zip ties secured their hands behind their backs, and the bared steel of Bran’s katana discouraged any attempt at escape. The men had been stripped down to their underwear and white tank tops, which were smeared with bright red blood.
Sal got out of the truck as Bran lowered the tailgate and pulled the first man out, pushing him into Sal. His growl rattled the double window pane and Sal batted him roughly aside. The man fell hard to one side and lay there, his shoulder twisted awkwardly.
Shauna c
ame around the back of the house and regarded Istaqua with a cold stare but quickly diverted it and lowered her head when Sal turned to bark something at her. Daphne, who had come out from behind the house just after Shauna, shrank two inches into a slouch.
I went outside, making sure the door made a sound when I shut it so I didn’t surprise anyone. All eyes (save for Shauna and Daphne’s, which remained glued to the ground) turned on me.
“What’s she doing here?” Istaqua snapped. “Pack and club only. That’s what we decided.”
“I’m Hunter’s proxy,” I offered, hoping that would be enough. Hunter wasn’t a full member of the pack yet, but he did have a stake. Everyone knew that. Now that the shooters were somehow going to be involved in the fight, I felt I had even more right to be there.
“She stays,” Sal said. There was an edge to his voice, as cold and sharp as the sword Bran had resting against both prisoner’s necks. “Alpha wasn’t the only one wronged here.”
“But the fight is a pack matter.” Istaqua didn’t sound argumentative. He stated it as fact.
“And when I win this, one of the first things I’ll do once everything else is sorted is bring Hunter into the pack.”
Shauna chanced raising her head. “You mean, you’ll hold a vote to bring him in.”
“No,” Sal growled in a rough voice, his eyes picking up their signature golden glow. “He needs the pack to help make him whole again.”
“But—”
“The pack’s always been a democracy, and that’s half the reason nothing ever gets done.”
Istaqua gave an approving grunt.
Daphne wiped tears away. Shauna’s face hardened and her voice reflected the cool, glowing blue of her eyes. “You wouldn’t say that if you were yourself.”
Sal took it as a challenge and started toward her. I decided I should intervene before he forgot he was supposed to be fighting.
“Saloso Silvermoon,” I called in the strongest voice I could manage.
He stopped midstride and lowered his foot, slowly turning glowing wolf eyes to glare at me. I had issued my own form of challenge by using his name in long form while daring to stand in a higher place relative to anyone else. Good. Someone needed to tell him he wasn’t in control of the situation.
I hadn’t meant to imply I was either. When the implication hit me, I quickly sank down to sit on the stairs and formulated the rest of what I planned to say as a request instead of an order. “Could I have a moment of your time?”
The request went over better than expected. “I need a drink anyway,” he growled to Istaqua, Shauna, and Daphne and then turned to stalk toward me.
I jumped up before he got there and pulled open the door. He stopped and looked me up and down with narrowed eyes before storming through. I gave him a few seconds before going in after him.
With the intensity that he was staring down the narrow hall, I wondered if he sensed Chanter’s ghost had been there and then quickly dismissed the idea. Werewolves might have a good nose, but I didn’t think ghosts had a smell.
“Are you going to kill those men?” I asked in a low voice.
“They killed Chanter. They hurt Hunter, could have killed you.” His shoulders heaved twice with heavy breaths. “I want them to suffer.”
“No, you don’t,” I said, stepping closer. “You want Chanter back. You want to stop hurting.”
He spun around and slammed a forearm against my chest, just below my throat. The move knocked me back, pinned me to the wall, and lifted me several inches from the ground.
“You don’t know anything about what I want,” he said with a snarl that told me he was only barely maintaining any humanity.
I swallowed and dropped my eyes away from his, staring at his nose instead. “Am I even talking to Sal right now? Or have you become so weak you can’t even fight it anymore?”
“I’m not weak.” He pressed my chest harder.
“Oh really,” I managed, wincing and wheezing at the pressure. Just a little more, and he would crack bones. “What kind of a wolf lets a coyote lead? What kind of an alpha lets himself get backed into a corner and lies there waiting for the end instead of fighting with everything he’s got? Valentino’s right. You can’t lead. That’s why you’ve let Istaqua tell you what to do.”
The words didn’t feel like mine, even though they came out of my mouth and lived in my head. It was as if another voice had whispered them into my ear and compelled me to say them. Chanter’s voice, I realized after I’d spoken. That must be what he meant.
Sal lunged forward and snapped his teeth next to my ear, his voice gravelly from the Change coming on. “I don’t bow to him. I won’t.”
“Then think this through,” I pleaded. “Don’t make me choose between loving you and what I believe is right.”
Sal’s face changed, softening, and eyes widening in realization. He withdrew his arm. I crumpled to the ground, gasping and rubbing at my sternum. The pain radiated through my whole ribcage. Every breath I drew made my throat feel raw.
“I’d never ask you to do that.”
Sal stood over me with his head lowered and turned to one side. His eyes were still gold and angry, but he looked hurt now on top of it. No, not hurt. Ashamed.
I risked reaching up to brush his fingers. “I know you wouldn’t. You’re not yourself. You’re hurt, grieving. I don’t know how to put you back together, but I know you need the pack if you’re ever going to stand that chance.” He watched me with the interest of a wounded animal. Had he been a wolf, his ears would have been back, and his fur ruffled at the neck. “You have to win, but you have to keep control of the wolf.”
“If Chanter were here…”
“But he’s not, and he knew the day was coming when he would leave things in your care. No, he didn’t count on going so soon, but he knew it was coming. I know if he was here, he could help you, but we have to manage without him.”
Sal sighed and said in a whisper, “I don’t know how.”
“Yes, you do.” I wove my fingers around his. “But you don’t want to, and it’s hard, I know. The same way it was hard when I had to learn to live without Alex. I felt alone then, too. When it happened, I thought I might die along with him, it hurt so bad. It’s okay to admit how much it hurts to lose someone you love and to be betrayed by someone you used to love. It’s okay to admit Zoe hurt you and that losing Chanter hurts.”
“But I can’t look weak, not when they need me.”
I squeezed his hand tighter. “I’m not pack. You tell me whatever you need to say, grieve with me however you need to grieve. Do it with me so that when you go out there and face them, you can be their strength.”
The muscles in his throat worked as he tried to find words and failed. Finally, he squeezed my hand back and then sank down onto the floor next to me with a loud thud that shook the whole house. Sal collapsed forward, head on my shoulder. The extra weight hurt and pushed me back against the wall. He made a choking sound, and his shoulders shuddered against me. I put one arm up over his back and leaned into his head, closing my eyes.
New pressure came down on my other shoulder. My eyes snapped open, and I looked up to see Chanter’s ghost standing over us, one hand on my shoulder and one on Sal’s. “Stupid wolf,” he said, but there was no anger in his voice. “Wise girl.”
“Help him,” I mouthed.
Chanter’s form flickered, and he sighed, taking his hands off both of us. “He must do this one without me.” Then, like a lightbulb burning out, the ghost grew brighter and vanished.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I don’t know how long we stayed like that. The sunlight filtering in through the kitchen window dimmed and turned blue, then gray. No more cars pulled in, meaning Valentino wasn’t there yet. Outside, I could hear the muffled voices of Istaqua, Bran, and Daphne. Shauna growled once, and it sounded very close to the front door. I thought maybe she’d decided to stand watch.
Sal stayed leaning against me, his head on my sh
oulder. The extra weight made my tailbone hurt and my legs go numb. There was a damp, salty puddle on my shoulder and running down the front of my shirt in streaks from his tears, though he’d long ago stopped weeping. His breathing was calm and his muscles slack, as if he were asleep. Maybe he was. He needed rest more than anything, least of all to be fighting someone he considered a brother for control of the pack.
Two vehicles pulled into the driveway. One of them was Ed’s moped. I knew only because his puttered out earlier than the other, presumably Valentino’s El Camino. The last members of the pack had arrived. We were out of time. I reached up and touched the side of his face.
“I know,” he said before I could speak.
“You should go get cleaned up,” I said. “Clear your head and get where you need to be. Remember, Valentino challenged you. You’re just defending your place. You don’t need to go overboard.”
“And the two shooters Istaqua and I found?” He leaned back, eyes bloodshot. His normally earthy-coppery skin had a few splotches of lighter color. “Would you still have me hand them over to you? Istaqua won’t let that happen. I doubt the pack will accept it.”
I gave him a firm look and put my hands on either side of his face. “If you are the alpha of this pack, then they will obey whatever orders you give.”
He made a small sound, somewhere between a whine and a sigh. “But how do I know what the right one is? Should I just let them go? Turn them over to you? Go with Marcus’ plan?”
“What would Chanter want you to do?”
Sal frowned, looked down to the floor, and then nodded. He stood and pulled me up with him. I had more of a hard time standing than I should have, but only because my legs still felt like wet, vibrating spaghetti.
“You should go on out,” he told me. “I need some time alone in here to think and get ready.”
“What should I tell Valentino? I thought you were supposed to get started at dusk.”