“Back entrance,” my wolf suggested, not deigning to respond to my doubt. “Ask the cave woman for help.”
And without waiting for permission, she yanked me under. Slapped me with her mulishness and thrust me into a trance.
I nearly caused us to drown then, mouth gasping open at the abrupt change of skin. The painter—I—was swimming against a current, our arms stretched out in front of us as we dragged our way through a watery chamber barely large enough for a human body to navigate.
She’d already been under so long our lungs were bursting, the need for oxygen pounding blood-red against eyes open to the dark. But she snapped our mouth shut before I could swallow water. Pushed forward harder until something did burst, only not our lungs.
Our head popped out of the water like a cork bobbing to the surface. We gasped and panted so hard it took a full second for me to realize the roaring didn’t originate within our shared ears.
The world was pitch dark, the pure, starless oblivion you only find beneath the earth’s surface. But I could estimate the space based on echoes. Could imagine the deep pool of water we pulled ourself out of, only a few feet from a tremendous crashing waterfall.
In the dark, the roar was daunting. Like a dragon flying down to burn a village into a roasted feast.
But the cave woman wasn’t alarmed by the flow of falling water. Instead, she took a running leap and thrust herself through it, water hitting our head, our shoulders, subtly knocking us off course.
Then we were through. Wolf-assisted nose turned left toward the barely tangible scent of living plant matter. Feet followed, continuing to trace the path to the outside world each time our pathway split.
We were traveling as fast as we could through the darkness. Our speed made sense as a splash of water was followed by a distant shout.
Scents promised many werewolves had followed us through the submerged channel. Bitter anger, acrid rage, cold determination.
The aromas were enough to add yet another dose of speed to feet smarting from running naked over rough stone. Our pursuers would be able to smell us also. They’d track us down if we slipped into a secluded chamber and holed up in hopes we’d be overlooked.
Then light began filtering into the cavern. Rock walls—rough, unpainted—grew more visible. Maybe outside we could finally elude our followers.
We darted into sunlight but not into safety. Instead, we leapt straight into a pair of waiting hands.
“ARE YOU ALRIGHT?” THE pregnant girl asked breathily, her words making as much sense as if she’d spoken English. Only, the syllables were alien, and I lost track of what she was saying for a moment as I focused on the sounds that made each sentence up.
While I struggled to regain my understanding of the conversation, the painter drew the girl away from the entrance and toward a cluster of tall, shielding rock pillars. There, my brain finally clicked puzzle pieces together, explaining why the pregnant girl’s language made at least a modicum of sense.
Pack. That had to be the difference. Some newfound werewolf ability that had appeared when I first turned wolf.
Regardless of the technical reason for my comprehension, I found that if I relaxed my focus on individual words sufficiently, I could follow their conversation once again. Still, the moment I’d lost was a crucial one. The leather pouch had been passed from one woman to the other while I was navel-gazing, wolf sculpture now cupped in the younger woman’s hands.
“I will,” the girl promised. “I know. But what about you?”
“I—” the painter started.
The clatter of a stone halted her answer. We spun, breath catching as pursuing werewolves sprinted out of the narrow entrance to the cave.
They were close enough to see the painter but not the younger woman. The cave woman took advantage of that obscured vision to make herself the sole target of attack.
Stepping forward, she didn’t bother to protect herself. And her pursuers—cowards—leapt upon her in wolf form without bothering to speak.
There were so many of them. And each was deathly angry. Long canine teeth came together in the exact spot where my own arm had been broken while other teeth clenched down around our waist, our shoulder, our leg.
Our shared body crumpled in an instant. Crumpled...and twisted just a hair sideways. Somehow, the painter had reserved enough intention to widen our eyes purposefully at the pregnant girl.
The latter was frozen, staring in horror, only half-hidden now behind the rock. At any moment, our attackers would see her and fall upon her. Which would make our sacrifice for naught.
So the painter and I together put command into a voice that didn’t even rise to the level of a whisper. “Go!” we mouthed, eyes flashing warning.
Our body was flung sideways by the force of a new wolf attacking. Teeth rending, claws tearing. We shrank beneath their frenzy even as the girl we’d protected dropped the hard-earned wolf statue from one unfeeling hand.
The sculpture plummeted into snow, disappearing instantly. In response, the cave woman’s heart pumped so rapidly it felt like a terrified bird within our chest trying to beat its way out.
But the painter didn’t despair, despite the vast quantity of blood spilling around us. She merely turned her head sideways against the bloody snow so she could watch the pregnant girl slide backwards, the pouch she bore thudding heavily between her breasts.
There was something inside still. Hope for the future?
But the pain in our body was too intense for us to watch any longer. Our eyes grew weary. Our rasping breath faded.
This time when I fell out of the painter’s world, it wasn’t because she pushed me.
It was because there was no one left to push.
Chapter 23
“Awake?” The scent of fur flooded me at the same moment the single word worked its way through my fogged hearing. Unlike the last time I’d woken from a vision in the proximity of a werewolf, however, this voice wasn’t Claw’s. No wonder my instincts demanded that I flee, flee, flee!
Unfortunately, dying by proxy is a painful endeavor. So all I managed was a groan as sympathetic agony racked my frame.
She’s gone. I hadn’t realized how attached I’d grown to the cave woman until our connection was fully severed. I felt as if I’d been present at the brutal murder of a beloved family member. Like I’d lost the mother I’d never known.
And for a moment, I forgot the danger of my surroundings. Forgot the scent of werewolf and the male voice that had greeted me when I awoke. Instead, I was back in the cave, albeit only in memory. Was watching the painter stroke red ochre across a smooth rock wall. She spoke gibberish...only this time I understood her.
“Follow your heart,” she told me, voice smooth and serene as prehistoric patter twisted into English. “Trust your gut.”
Then electric fur invaded my nostrils and the voice above me exploded into a string of expletives that—ironically—assured me I’d survive the present after all. That was Harry. Definitely Harry. His vocabulary was more impressive than I would have thought.
Opening my eyes slowly, I blinked up at a man who was naked save for a handgun holstered under his left armpit. And despite his evident obsession with my survival, he didn’t at first notice that I’d woken up.
“No, we can’t call for help.” He was clearly talking to his wolf, engaging in what appeared from the outside to be a one-sided argument. “We howl and Blackburn hears us. We leave her and Claw will rip out our liver for abandoning his egg.
“Egg,” he continued. “What an idiotic order. I don’t even like eggs. Not boiled or fried or poached....”
“You probably like them in cake, though,” I countered, sitting up with an effort and ignoring the spike of agony piercing my head. “Or maybe in noodles.” The painter, I suspected, would have told me to find common ground with this werewolf. After all, he’d guarded me while I appeared asleep.
But any chivalry Harry might have possessed eroded the moment I started moving. “You’re alive,
” he said, sounding more annoyed than relieved at the realization. He did offer me a hand up...then he released me so quickly I might as well have been coated with poison. Finally, turning back in the direction I’d come from, he donned eau de overbearing asshole.
“Let’s go,” he commanded. “I’m not waiting if you dilly dally. Get your ass into gear.”
HARRY WAS INTENT UPON returning to the rock shelter and embarking upon the plan the pack had cooked up without me. But the painter had told me to follow my heart.
My heart said: Enter the cave. Find Jim Kelter. Ditch Blackburn. Figure out how to use the stone sculpture I still clutched in one hand.
That was so simple I hadn’t even needed to use my thumb while counting. And, okay, so the final two bullet points were a trifle slippery, but I was sure they’d coalesce once I dealt with the first part.
So I closed my eyes and visualized where the cave’s back entrance might be in relation to my current location. The effort involved an imaginary trek backwards from the rock shelter to the painted cavern then forward along the path the cave woman had stumbled through with werewolves in pursuit. If I hadn’t gotten confused by the cave woman’s sprint down the darkened escape route, its opening would be....
Turning in the proper direction, I made sure the wolf sculpture was safely zipped in one pocket before trudging downhill to the south. Harry had disappeared in the other direction, so I was leaving my pack rather than returning to it. I braced myself against the ensuing surge of lupine loneliness, glad when my wolf’s melancholy faded into determination as sturdy as my own.
Jim Kelter is part of our pack also, she decided. Well, if that worked for her, I wasn’t going to argue. Together, we followed a route that wound inexorably in the proper direction, traveling nearly a third of the way before Harry materialized behind our back.
“What. Are. You. Doing?” he demanded, the proximity of his teeth to my neck raised hairs up and down my spine.
Still, I didn’t pause or even slow as I traced the path I’d envisioned. “I’m finding the President,” I shot back as I kept walking, using the Big Dipper to gauge the direction in which to travel.
To my surprise, Harry didn’t toss me over one shoulder and force me to return with him to the rock shelter. Maybe he couldn’t, Claw’s mandate requiring him to treat me with kid gloves. But he did grumble and backtalk for the rest of the night and into the morning, so much so that I started losing faith in my wolf’s direction sense.
“Oh goodie. Let’s wander around in more circles,” Harry groused as we crossed a stream I had a sinking suspicion we’d waded through twice before. The trailing shifter was barefoot while Val’s boots protected me. It wasn’t really any wonder he was in a stinking bad mood.
My own emotions, unfortunately, were plummeting to match his with every step I took. So much could have changed in the thousands of years since the cave woman had lived in this landscape. There was no guarantee the rock pillars still existed.
Plus, there was that nagging suspicion that my father and the doctors had been right from the get-go. If I’d imagined the entire drama with the painter, then there might be no pillars to be found....
Now would be a good time for advice, I told my wolf desperately, only to find that she’d curled up into a ball and gone to sleep.
Perhaps she had so much faith in my abilities that she planned to nap until I discovered the back entrance. But I somehow thought she’d grown frustrated at my ineptitude and decided to escape in the only way she could.
“Maybe,” Harry started, but I slapped a hand over his mouth to silence him. Because I’d just heard the sweetest sound imaginable.
Off to my right, someone else was grumbling. The same cranky sound I heard every pet-sitting morning. A raven cawing a request for her snack.
ADENA WAS PERCHED ON a kerosene lantern in the middle of a cold-weather campsite. There was no fire—clearly Blackburn hadn’t wanted to alert us to his presence. But the door to the pup tent was open and the sleeping bag inside looked thick enough to keep anybody warm.
Thick enough...but currently empty and bone cold to the touch. I glanced across at Harry as I rose from testing the fabric, watched him shimmer upward out of wolf form while shaking his head. “Too many trails,” he informed me. “Hard to tell where Blackburn went most recently.”
But I could guess. It was now only a few hours away from the time of the proposed meetup, and Blackburn didn’t have a pack to depend upon. So he’d stash Jim Kelter somewhere out of sight then travel to the crash site in a roundabout manner with the goal of arriving before Claw showed up.
“We should have at least an hour to find Jim Kelter,” I said, finishing the thought. Adena had flown onto my shoulder and I absently scratched her neck as I laid out our game plan. “Find him, shift him, get him out of danger while Blackburn is busy elsewhere.”
I fully expected Harry to argue or at least start muttering about scrambled eggs for the thousandth time during our unlikely partnership. But, instead, he gestured toward the obvious cave entrance, ready and willing to continue with our hunt.
Okay. We’re doing this. I removed Adena from my shoulder and lifted the lantern, grateful when the bird failed to follow us inside.
The cave looked just like it had in my vision, and I couldn’t resist running fingers across strangely familiar rocks I’d never seen in real life. I couldn’t believe I was finally going to see those ancient drawings in the flesh....
“Use your nose,” Harry growled, dragging me back into the present. Quite literally—his hand was on my shoulder turning me away from the right-hand tunnel I’d started down at a split.
My inner wolf grabbed my senses for a moment, sniffing at the air. Sure enough, I should have turned left there. I retraced a couple of steps then proceeded, listening for the roar of the subterranean waterfall.
Only, the waterfall no longer existed. Or so I discovered when a trickle of water slipped through the part in my hair, spurring me to tip the lantern so I could gaze up...
...And up, and up. Here, the cave had expanded out to the same height as the painted cavern, but a natural wonder created the centerpiece rather than an ochre-streaked menagerie. Far above me, I could see the opening that the waterfall once cascaded out of, the intervening years reducing the flow of water to a simple drip.
“Jim Kelter is this way,” Harry called from an opening on the left side of the chamber. But that was wrong. I remembered the cave woman entering this space much closer to where I was standing, behind the waterfall and slightly to the right....
Yes, there it was. The hole she’d wriggled out of. It looked unbelievably small now, tinier than it had felt while the painter pulled herself upstream. Still, I was willing to put up with a bit of discomfort to see her ancient art.
Ignoring Harry’s growing impatience, I knelt down to peer into the enclosed channel. The opening was wet around the edges, as if the water flowing through it had been squelched much more recently than I’d originally imagined. And, as I glanced in Harry’s direction, I suddenly understood what was going on.
This was Blackburn’s backup plan. A dammed underground river. A second set of explosives. Plus—what? Some sort of remote detonation button he could press if we didn’t give him everything he asked for perhaps?
It was suddenly twice as imperative to follow Harry’s lead and get Jim Kelter out of here immediately. So why did my gut demand that I continue hunting for the painted cave?
Chapter 24
“Egg. Are you coming?” Harry’s voice broke into my analysis, but I continued staring into the tiny hole the cave woman had swum through thousands of years earlier.
She’d told me to follow my heart, and my heart demanded that I retrace her footsteps. But wouldn’t that be circular logic if my needy heart had created the painter out of thin air?
“Olivia, it’s time to find Jim Kelter.” Harry was so close to me now that I could smell the electricity of a wolf asserting its dominance over another.
Immediately, my shoulders hunched up around my ears while my neck bowed in acknowledgement of his superiority....
But I wasn’t meek and I didn’t have to submit to another werewolf. Plus, there was the issue of the wolf statue’s instruction manual to decipher.
“We need to go this way first,” I countered, using my father’s most commanding voice to break through Harry’s attempted compulsion. Then seizing the moment, I explained as much as I was able to without mentioning my trances.
“I don’t know how to use the wolf statue yet; I just know it’s important,” I told my only ally. “There’s a cave through here that I hope will provide answers. It has prehistoric paintings on the walls....”
“Could you stop being an archaeologist for one single minute?” Harry was furious, either because I was disagreeing with his plan of action or because I’d broken through his compulsion as easily as if it were a soap bubble.
Probably the reason was—both.
“I’m not...” I interjected, trying to figure out how to explain the gut feeling that made me itch to wriggle through this tiny hole in the rock wall before me.
But Harry spoke over me. “The President is our mission, and the President is this way,” he growled. “If you want to go hunting for moldy finger paintings, be my guest. Claw’s not far behind us. He can deal with your stupidity when he arrives.”
Claw’s not far behind us? My wolf woke at the words, heightening my senses. Now I could smell the furry avocado of the President that had made Harry so certain his pathway was the correct one. Off in the distance, a murmur of familiar voices bubbled up like clear water rushing over rounded stones.
Wait for our pack, my wolf suggested. But they’d have no more reason than Harry to search for my cave painting. And, given Claw’s overwhelming presence, the newcomers would also possess far more ability to make me veer from my chosen path.
No, I couldn’t wait for a pack who’d already proven they didn’t believe me. Without another word of explanation, I got down on my belly and pushed the lantern before me into the dark.
Wolf Dreams Page 12