Wolf Dreams

by Aimee Easterling

  I HALF EXPECTED HARRY to grab my legs and yank me backwards. But he didn’t. Just snarled once then let me go.

  Even without his physical resistance, it was tough going. The irregular stone floor and walls made me glad to have Val’s leather clothing, but my curves were larger than the cave woman’s. To put it bluntly, my hips and butt barely fit through several rather harrowing spots.

  Then there was the fact I was dragging myself along one-armed, struggling not to crush my broken bone against the uneven ground. But, eventually, the dense panting of my breath no longer pressed back against me. Rock no longer forced me to slither on knees and belly. I was out in the open, yawning darkness expanding on every side.

  For one long moment, I knelt there, afraid to raise the lantern and peer past the sea of damp pebbles. Because this was the moment I’d been waiting for during half my lifetime. The chance to see a work of prehistoric wonder...or to discover that I really was crazy just like the doctors had said.

  We’re not crazy, my wolf grumbled, seizing control of my arm and lifting the lantern. Sure enough, there before us were my favorite horses, larger than life as they galloped across the wall.

  I couldn’t breathe as I took in the wonder. A replacement artist must have gone to work after my painter died because the walls were plastered with prehistoric art. My awestruck eyes took in a stampeding herd of bison, a couple of camels, plus a saber-tooth cat that would have told me instantly that this cave was located in North America rather than Europe the way I’d initially supposed.

  I turned in a slow circle, watching lantern light illuminate the cave walls. This was art and magic. Stunning proof of inhabitation of North America far earlier than had previously been supposed.

  The paintings were also proof that I wasn’t crazy. I couldn’t decide which realization was responsible for stealing my breath.

  “The question is, what does that mean for you?” I asked the wolf statue after one long moment of wonder, pulling the stone animal out of my pocket so I could cup it in ten trembling fingers. The spark of inspiration I’d been hoping for had yet to materialize. Perhaps if I placed the statue on the altar the painter had danced around....

  But as I took a step forward, I caught a flicker of movement behind me. And the cold male voice that went with it set me spinning to take in a familiar face.

  “Ah, so you do have it.”

  You’re supposed to be at the crash site, I protested silently. You’re meeting Claw there in less than an hour.

  Of course, Claw had followed me and Harry in search of Jim Kelter. And Blackburn was undeniably here as well.

  He’d stripped down to undershirt and boxers before following me through the tunnel, so he was streaked with mud from head to toe. The picture would have been laughable, should have been laughable. But he clutched an antenna-topped box that I knew in my gut was a remote control linked to the absent waterfall.

  “Excellent,” Blackburn continued, the wolf behind his eyes dancing gleefully. “I see we understand each other.” He took a single step closer, swiped the stone wolf out of my lax fingers. “Now show me how this thing works.”

  I’D ASSUMED THE PAINTER’S death coincided with the end of my visions. So I ignored the tingles at my temples and the tunneling of my vision one moment too long.

  “I don’t know how to...” I started.

  Then the world went black.

  First black, then white. Our eyes blinked open as the body I inhabited ran four-legged through a fast-falling snow storm.

  But who....? Forcing myself to forget Blackburn and the explosives and the President for just one moment, I focused on the body I traveled within instead.

  A leather pouch thudded between our forelegs while the slight waddle to our hips clinched the werewolf’s identity. I’d thought my forays into the past were over, but that had been a faulty hypothesis. Instead, I appeared to have hopped from the dead painter into the pregnant girl.

  Behind us, freezing air was rent by the howls of pursuing werewolves. They were several miles back but were likely running faster than we could manage in our pregnant state. Plus, when we turned to peer in their direction, a glowing thread of light arrowed back from us toward them.

  Pack bond, my wolf informed me, voice happy as she missed the most obvious corollary. Yes, this connection might make her feel whole for the first time since our transformation. But, for the pregnant girl, it meant a complete inability to escape.

  Worse, the girl’s strength was flagging. Stumbling to a halt, our head hung low as we struggled to fill our lungs with oxygen. Then, gathering energy like a deep breath before diving, we shifted upward onto two shivering human feet.

  Swaying, we clutched at the pouch the painter had given us. Turned it over and shook the bottom until it disgorged a small, stone wolf that I’d seen once before.

  This was the pregnant animal the painter had been carving during one of my recent visions. So there’d been two statues, one dropped in the snow and sitting there for centuries until Blackburn found it. The other in the pouch waiting to be used.

  It all made perfect sense now, the pieces having clicked together the moment I saw the visible thread of light connecting this woman to the wolves running behind her. The statue was meant to break the pack bond, giving this poor, abused woman time in which to flee from danger. The second statue, the one she’d dropped, was meant to do the same for the baby after it was born.

  The baby’s future, shadowed as it was, wasn’t the primary problem at the moment. As the pregnant woman turned the stone wolf over and over with frozen fingers while her pursuers drew rapidly closer, I realized the larger problem.

  We were back in the same spot I’d been in with regard to the President. One magical object present and accounted for, but no idea how to make it work.

  Chapter 25

  Only, I did know. Science was all about gathering data and working backward from evidence to root causes. I’d seen these statues imbued with power, so I could guess how to bring that power back out.

  To that end, I drew upon everything I’d learned while watching the cave woman turn art into magic. I seized control over the pregnant girl’s body. Then I followed my heart.

  “Shift,” I commanded, surprised at how easy it was to force a lupine body to burst out of the human. “Now take the sculpture in your mouth.”

  The stone was rough against our tongue and hard against our molars. Still, the awkwardness felt entirely right.

  “Now shift again,” I ordered. And for one split second, I thought her salvation might be as easily won as that.

  Only, of course, it wasn’t. That’s the trouble with correlations—cause and effect aren’t necessarily as closely intertwined as one might expect them to be.

  My first hint that I’d misstepped came when a cold wind whipped through our skin and into our stomach like ice picks. No, it wasn’t a wind—it was magic ripping and tugging, pulling at us for one endless moment before shifting sideways to form a noose around the neck of the pregnant woman’s wolf.

  And I saw now why the painter had rejected the girl’s request the first time. Because this statue wasn’t intended to simply break pack bonds. It was meant to tear out a shifter’s inner beast.

  The wind pushed and pulled with relentless abandon. The wolf scrabbled at nothing, struggling to stay in place. But the statue was strong, its demands irresistible. With a pop, the wolf was outside the girl’s body even as the statue shattered within her mouth.

  I suspected the wolf spirit to go then. To disappear into whatever void we all travel through in death. Instead, the displaced wolf fought to reenter the pregnant woman’s body. Biting and pawing, it raised welts on its host’s skin as she thrashed and writhed against the snow.

  On the one hand, the painter’s magic was working—the pack bond was lessening with every passing moment. But the girl was being battered so badly I was afraid she’d injure the unborn baby. I couldn’t let this struggle go on.

  So I did the
only thing I could think of. I slid out a tendril of my own pack bond. Twitched it in the air as if I were playing with Adena, then winced as the pregnant girl’s wolf spirit snapped the end between its teeth.

  The wolf spirit ran up that thread of light as fast as a retreating spider. Slipped onto my shoulder with claws as sharp as Adena’s, then dug with those same claws until it had tunneled its way in.

  The pregnant girl’s breath calmed and gentled. She rose, looked behind her at the empty space where the pack bond had been located, then started running.

  I barely noticed the passing scenery as my own reality twisted, curling into confusion. No wonder when inside me, two wolves bared their teeth, postured, then began to fight.

  I GASPED BACK INTO my own skin on the rough stone floor of the cavern. The dampness beneath me was overwhelmed by the battling canines inside.

  “You’re as bad as I was,” Blackburn growled above me. His heel nudged my kidneys, but that didn’t hurt nearly as much as the wolves clawing their way through my midsection. “You smelled perfectly ordinary yesterday. Now look at you. Another victim to that prehistoric booby-trap.”

  So Blackburn had been Changed via an artifact rather than with a syringe the way I was. I tried to cling to that revelation, but my wolf and the pregnant girl’s beast were both working their way up to my brainstem, jostling for footholds and settling on tooth-holds instead.

  One long canine fang broke in the mouth of the invading wolf as she struggled for leverage. Then my wolf yelped as the invader’s front paw caught in my own wolf’s ear and tore.

  “...the solution.” Blackburn’s voice, in contrast, sounded so easy and human that I pushed my attention toward the outside world for the sake of self-preservation. “The fang was a wild-goose chase,” he continued. “But this statue, I’m certain, provides the cure as well as the curse.”

  The cure as well as the curse.... Despite the battling wolves inside me, I could see what had happened with the clarity of revelation.

  Blackburn had camped out in his own house after his accidental transformation, clinging to shreds of sanity while trying to Change himself back. Thus the big dog that was scaring students. The wolf statue stuffed into a hollowed-out cat tooth found when investigators returned to the supposed crime scene. The thief with the code for the department vault who threatened me, demanding to know where something was.

  Blackburn must have had suspicions enough about my involvement to follow me to the airstrip. He’d somehow missed the statue in my pocket and had instead planted explosives and a tracking device on Air Force One when it returned.

  He was so certain that the statue was the cure for his lycanthropy...which meant I had to get back the artifact for Jim Kelter. That larger purpose was enough to bring me to my knees then my feet, despite the two wolf spirits who seemed likely to claw their way free of my skin at any moment.

  “Eh, eh, eh,” Blackburn warned, taking a single step backward. He raised the hand holding the remote. “If you want your President to survive, you’ll tell me everything you know about the statue. You’ll....”

  Which is when my wolf became aware of the external danger. She’d been so engrossed in fighting the cave woman’s spirit that she’d barely paid attention to Blackburn. Now, she sprang out of me in a whirlwind of shredded clothing and vicious energy. The pregnant girl’s wolf couldn’t compete in this arena, so she fled, whimpering, deep beneath our skin.

  “You bitch,” Blackburn started, raising his foot in preparation for a second jab to the kidneys.

  But this time his heel had nothing to connect with. Because my wolf was leaping forward, bloodthirsty. She was battle mad from her previous territorial undertaking, protective of herself and of me.

  She landed on Blackburn’s chest, driving him downward so fast he couldn’t fight against her. Instead, he did exactly what we should have expected.

  Hands clenched into fists in surprised aggression. I don’t think he even realized he was pressing the button on the remote control.

  THE GROUND SHOOK WITH the force of the explosion, but the sound emanated from above our heads rather than beneath our feet. Of course, that was where the water had been pooling. And now, dam broken, the liquid flowed along the course of least resistance.

  A newborn stream gushed out of the tunnel I’d crawled down. That narrow entrance restricted the flow to a raging rivulet, but other paths would be wider, more inviting. How much faster would water fill the tunnel in which the President had been stashed?

  I could only guess as I tried to push the wolf out of her body. We needed to find the President and help Harry free him. We needed to get out of here before our path to safety fully submerged....

  But my wolf had different priorities. Ignoring me, she swiped out at Blackburn, dancing around a shifter whose metamorphosis was painfully slow in comparison. He was barely sprouting fur as we tasted the first salty mouthful of his blood.

  This wasn’t a battle. It was a massacre. Exactly what my wolf preferred.

  Blackburn beat his arms weakly against us, but we barely noticed. My wolf bit down harder, the flesh before us darkening gray in lupine vision where human eyes would have seen it blossoming into red.

  Now Blackburn was shrieking. Screaming and struggling as my wolf feasted upon his shoulder. She wasn’t subduing; she was reveling. Ripping great gobs of meat out of his arm, his chest, and finally his neck.

  “Stop!” I demanded.

  Or tried to. The wolf was in complete control of our body, her actions ten times more terrifying than what I’d imagined while dulling my senses with anti-anxiety medication for fourteen long years.

  And there was nothing I could do to stop her. Nothing I could do except close my eyes and try not to feel the chunks of hot meat sliding past me as I hovered there inside my wolf’s gullet. She was brutal and horrifying...then she paused and tilted her head sideways, attention pulled away from her meal by something seen or sensed or heard.

  At first, all I noticed was blood splashed across the horse painting. Streaks of liquid turning a prehistoric da Vinci into a Pollock painting instead.

  And, yes, I’ll admit it. For one split second, loss of the ancient horses hurt worse than the fact I was eating a human being alive.

  But then I noticed water dribbling down from the ceiling to dilute Blackburn’s bodily fluids. Noticed rocks loosening as the wall’s structural integrity slipped and slid.

  The cave was collapsing around us. A tug in my stomach turned into a thread of light arrowing away from us and back in the direction we’d come from.

  Pack. The realization that we were attached to someone outside the painted cavern caught my wolf’s attention. The sure knowledge that someone was calling us, tugging on our connection, made her jaws loosen so Blackburn’s body slid loose and hit the floor with a sickening thud.

  We hadn’t been eating him alive after all. Not when our opponent lay motionless where he fell.

  We’d been eating him dead. I squeezed out tears, only then noticing I was human.

  Pack, my wolf demanded, using my opposable thumbs to scoop up the wolf statue then seek something in which to carry it. Pawing through Blackburn’s possessions, we decided he didn’t need his belt pouch now that he was dead.

  I only realized I wasn’t thinking clearly when I started laughing. My hoots of hysterical humor echoed off the rock walls like the cackling of loons.

  Our pack needs us now, my wolf reminded me. She wasn’t bothered by the fact that our fingers were sticky with bodily fluids. Wasn’t concerned about the lifeless human on the cavern floor.

  All she cared about was the belt pouch large enough for the wolf statue to fit inside. We cinched the buckle as tight as it would go with difficulty, the fingers on my broken arm refusing to assist in the endeavor. Then we dove into the deepening pool of water and started to swim.

  Chapter 26

  I don’t remember much about that uphill battle against the current. I think my wolf took over even though I
remained human, clawing through pitch darkness and releasing bubble after bubble of carbon dioxide to get through tight squeezes.

  Then we popped through to the other side, opening our mouth as we gathered our feet under us in preparation for inhaling a great big gulp of restorative air. Only...the world was still liquid. The knee-high pool the painter had emerged into was now an immense ocean. I barely had the presence of mind to clamp my mouth back shut before I swallowed water and choked.

  Frantic, I pushed off the wall and swam forward. Okay, so the dam bursting had filled this chamber with water. Still, the way Harry and I had come in should be nearby on my left. That tunnel had slanted downward as we traversed it. If I just swam upward now as quickly as possible, I should manage to make it far enough to take a breath before I drowned....

  No. Wrong way, my wolf countered. She wrenched our body around, pushed off the cave floor, arrowed directly upward. Or at least, I thought we might be going upward. The roil of moving water from the cascade confused my sense of direction until I feared we were swimming aimlessly with no rational plan.

  Our lungs ached so badly so I could barely prevent myself from sucking in a tremendous gulp of water. Then I lost it and gasped in...air as my head broke through the surface at last.

  I inhaled so hard I lost control of my body, barely realized someone had come up behind me to keep my mouth above water as I coughed and choked. “Breathe,” Claw murmured, voice so calm and solid it was easy to forget we were both treading water in pitch darkness. Then a light flicked on behind him, giving me my first inkling of the extent of our mess.

  The empty cavern where Harry and I had split up had turned into a vast, subterranean pool of rapidly rising water. The cascade off to my right roared twice as fast as I remembered from my vision, making up for lost time now that the exit point was no longer dammed.