by Kati Wilde
And good at rubbing them. I sigh with pleasure when he grabs my left foot and starts in on my heel. “Why does this never feel as good when I do it myself? It’s like washing hair. It always feels so much better when someone else does it.”
“You let me into your shower, I’ll do that for you, too.”
I laugh. “Yeah, no. Washing this hair is a process. Not playtime.”
“Then I’ll just sit here and admire the results of that process.” He inhales now, then growls softly, “You smell like apples.”
“From the cider. Do you want some? I’ve got regular and mulled, which is amazing if you add just a tiny splash of bourbon.”
His gleaming eyes narrow. “Are you trying to ply me with liquor, Makena?”
That’s an interesting question. “Could you be plied with liquor?”
Slowly he shakes his head, then closes his eyes on a long inhalation. “You don’t need to. Your scent is more intoxicating than any drink.”
My scent. Which brought him here—this man who inadvertently opened the door on a family history that I knew nothing about, turning my world upside down. A man who I can so easily imagine as part of my future. Because how many times have I pictured something like this? Sitting on a porch swing after a long day’s work, talking easily without really saying much, with someone who makes me smile and laugh. With someone who’s completely ordinary yet also completely extraordinary. Someone I can sit still with, but who also makes my pulse jump. I could imagine so many more nights and days with Ethan.
Except he’s leaving. And he’s not really here for me anyway. Just some strange pheromone that’s affecting him against his will, considering that he spent three years fighting it. And although he says that once he tracks down his family’s killers, he’ll be back…I guess we’ll see. Because that wildflowers I just ordered will change everything.
With a heavy sigh, I pull my foot from his hand. He resists for only a moment before reluctantly letting go, then watches me with hooded eyes as I curl my legs beneath me.
“You all right?” he asks softly.
“Yeah.” Mostly. Except for the painful longing that’s tearing at me again. “Just thinking about how different everything is from what I expected it to be.”
He nods. “Discovering that werewolves are—”
“Not that.” I stop him and reach for my cider, wishing that I’d added a large splash of bourbon instead of a tiny one. “I mean… Before your family was killed, what did you imagine your life would be? Would you have stayed in the military?”
“For a few years, sure.”
“And then?”
“Go home. Settle down.”
With a family. Just imagining him with another woman makes my chest ache, so I skip over that. “What kind of job would you have wanted?”
“Something in law enforcement or in the fire department.”
“Like your parents were,” I remember.
He nods. “My brother, too. You might say protecting and serving is in the Grimmson blood.”
No kidding. “I’d say it literally is.”
He looks at me curiously. “What do you mean by that?”
“That the úlfhéðnar were warriors. They weren’t conquerors, though—they didn’t use their strength to further their own interests. Their role was to protect and serve their king. And if he was a conqueror…well, that’s a different story.”
He nods, accepting that as easily as he does every bit of information about the úlfhéðnar. “And what about you? Is ranching in your blood?”
A laugh escapes me. “Apparently not. Though a week ago, I thought it must be. But instead I’ve got hunting and books in my blood. So maybe that’s why I intended to go to college and run all over the world.”
“You didn’t picture yourself on the ranch?”
“No, I intended to be far, far away. To get the hell out of Fortune City. Not because I hated it or anything, I just…planned to make my own way.”
“Doing what?”
“I had no idea. I didn’t have a calling, so I just assumed that I’d figure it out as I went along. So my only plan was to attend college and travel some.”
“But you didn’t?”
“No. Not after…” But I don’t want to dwell on my parents’ deaths now. “I could have. Jonas would have been all right on his own. But after they were gone… I don’t know. The ranch was a link to them.”
“You are a link to them. No matter where you go. That’s one thing I know for sure, Makena. My family ain’t in our homestead back in Montana. I carry them with me.”
“I know you’re right. But I still like feeling them around me.” The ranch. The rings. Absently rubbing the silver on my thumb, I ask, “Will you go back after you find their killers?”
“Yeah, I’ll go back home and settle down, just as I always intended. But home ain’t a place to me. It’ll be wherever you are.”
As long as he can smell me. That ache in my chest deepens. “It’s funny, though. We both did exactly the opposite of what we intended.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, I meant to leave home but didn’t go anywhere. And you meant to go home but have been moving around ever since.”
“Considering that drifting around brought me here, I can’t be sorry.” As the warmth of that statement spills through me, he asks gruffly, “And you? Do you regret staying?”
“No. Because I wouldn’t trade this for anything else.” A wry laugh breaks from me. “Clearly. Because if I would, I’d have taken MDC’s money and gotten the hell out of here.”
“So you don’t want to travel anymore?”
“Sure I do. But not always. A vacation here and there. Then always coming back.” I rub the ring on my thumb a little harder. “But maybe I should.”
“Should what?”
“Just sell. Maybe I’m holding on for the wrong reasons. Because it’s a link to my parents but now I don’t even know who they really were. So maybe it’s just…foolish.”
Ethan catches my chin, makes me meet his steady gaze. “It’s not.”
Just that simple. And that sure. Throat tight, I nod.
His thumb brushes my lips and he lets me go. A push of his foot sends the swing into gentle motion. For a long minute there’s only the creak of the chain and the song of the crickets.
At least for me. I can’t imagine what all he must hear. Perhaps fish leaping in the river. The breeze whispering through the leaves. The gathering wetness between my thighs.
Oh god. He can probably smell it. Because he hasn’t said anything, but…
Face flaming, I squeeze my legs tighter together and awkwardly clear my throat. “So… I’ve been going through my father’s notes—hoping to find something that will point you toward these hunters.”
He nods, silently watching me, waiting for me to continue.
“There isn’t much.” No flashing arrows, unfortunately. “But there is one bit that I thought might be helpful. Because the group was formed after Jean Chastel killed the Beast of Gévaudan, and at first the king paid for everything. But then what happened?”
He catches on. “The French Revolution happened.”
“Right. And goodbye to any royal funds. But the hunters are still traveling everywhere, seem to have a ton of resources, and so on. So where’s the money coming from? We’re talking hundreds of years.”
He nods thoughtfully. “The church?”
“Or a cabal of nobles with lots of money.”
“Some Illuminati shit?”
“Maybe. But I keep going back to ‘hundreds of years.’ Through uprisings and world wars and completely different political landscapes. You’d think someone would have cut them off. Some politician or aristocrat would have laughed and said ‘Werewolves, really?’ and stopped funding them.”
“Unless they have their own source of funds. A business that can serve as a front.”
“A business that can be used to legit travel. And maybe a business they can use
to help themselves along the way, marking up prices and using the extra profits to pay for the werewolf hunting activities. So I’d vote for jewelry—or something like a silversmith—because it has the added bonus of giving them access to a supply of silver.”
“That…would make a hell of a lot of sense,” he says slowly. “And might give me a new angle to look at.”
“Yeah. I mean, not that you should go slashing up Tiffany & Co. But when you’re looking at all these murders, it might be another thread to pull that can get you closer. Because if you’re running a business—any business—you think about all the ways you can write off expenses. And someone like my dad, he was researching all kinds of artifacts. There are drawings of rings and ornamental blades and royal crowns and all kinds of stuff in his notes. So maybe they say he’s a historical jewelry design consultant or something. And maybe that means if you run across someone who was connected to the scene in some way, and who might have something to do with precious metals and jewelry or something similar…you take another look at them. Or, in your case, go take another smell at them.”
He nods. “That’s good thinking.”
“Only if it’s right.” I sigh. “Because I was thinking about the money issue, but I might have fixated on the jewelry due to his notes.”
“Because of those drawings?”
“Partially. But also because it looks like he was trying to trace the source of this silver.” I tap my mother’s ring. “They’d used silver since the beginning, after they realized the Beast of Gévaudan could be hurt by it.” And because nothing else they tried seemed to have an effect. “Are you really impervious to steel and fire?”
“Pretty much, yeah. Is that in the notes, too?”
“No, that’s just part of the berserker legend. They weren’t only fierce and deadly, but steel and fire couldn’t touch them. So anyone with a sword or a torch was out of luck. What about lead bullets?”
“They hurt about as much as a bee sting. Unless it’s a yellow jacket. I’d rather get shot than step on a nest of yellow jackets.”
Remembering plenty of my own encounters with the vicious little fuckers, I have to agree. But I also have no real comparison. “Does that mean you’ve been shot?”
He nods.
“In the army?”
“A few times. Mostly at home, with my family shooting at me.”
“What?”
“For practice,” he says easily, as if that’s totally normal. “If something attacks me or hurts me, the instinct is to transform. But I was going overseas into a war zone. So I practiced being shot.”
“Wow.” So wow. I can barely wrap my head around it. “I mean, it makes sense. But wow.”
And something tells me that if a bullet really felt like a bee sting, there wouldn’t be a need to practice.
“Truth is, it wasn’t a lot of fun at the time,” he admits. “But I was grateful for it. The army doesn’t take kindly to a soldier who goes around changing into a werewolf and howling like a baby just because someone fires a tiny piece of lead at my ass.”
I have to laugh at that. “I bet.”
“Anyway, I figure that’s what parents do. They prepare you for the shit you might run into. Even if they don’t tell you it’s real or don’t think you’ll ever need it.”
He’s not talking about his family using him for target practice now. And…he’s not wrong. My parents must have prepared me for a world with werewolves in it, because I feel as if I’ve been taking the news rather well. All things considered.
And maybe they meant to tell me the truth, at some point. They couldn’t have known they were going to die—and how little time we’d have together. Yet they still left something that I could protect myself with.
His gaze falls to the ring around my thumb that I’m absently rubbing again. “You were saying something about that silver? Something from his notes about jewelry?”
“Oh.” I try to get my thoughts back on track. “So I was thinking that they probably didn’t use raw silver, especially at the beginning. Instead they must have melted down jewelry and whatnot and made their weapons. But at some point, they realized that some silver was…”
“Like poison to werewolves and could kill us.”
“But not only kill you. It keeps you from transforming, right?”
His reply is nothing but a nod accompanied by a low growl, as if not being able to transform angers him more than the part where it might kill him.
“So at first it looks as if the organization was searching for something that had been done to the silver.”
“Like a spell?”
“Maybe. Or something like the flower they used to make you all noseblind. That’s not magic; it’s just…tea. So they were hoping for, you know—”
“Add a pinch of salt, an eye of newt, get killer silver.”
“Exactly. Which would have been great for them, because then they can make a lot of it. But my dad starts thinking a different way. That maybe it’s not something done to the silver, but maybe there’s something special about where that silver originated. But the problem is, it’s all melted down together. So how do you know?”
“You can’t.”
“Unless you find a piece of jewelry that you can trace back to its origin. And that’s what I found in his notebook. There’s a necklace that he started looking at, searching for the craftsman and where he got his silver.”
“Did he find the source?”
“Yeah. He found it here. On the ranch.”
“You’re bullshitting me.”
I wish I was. Shaking my head, I tell him, “This place didn’t start out as a cattle ranch. Back in the day, it was part of the big silver rush and mining boom.”
“And your family bought it.”
“Yeah.” A deep pang thrums in my chest. “Mama always said they picked this place because she used to love those old spaghetti westerns, and becoming a cowboy and living a simple life appealed to her. But now I think…they took all that silver when they ran, and they wanted to make sure those hunters didn’t get their hands on more.”
“So they were protecting this place.”
Throat tight, I nod. “Which is just another reason not to ever sell.”
“To make sure more of that silver never gets out, or carrying on their legacy?”
“Maybe both.” Maybe it’s the same thing.
He nods, his amber gaze thoughtful. “How do you figure they knew about the necklace?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s nothing about that silver that looks or smells any different than other. So how do you figure he knew the necklace was the right kind? Did the hunters ask a werewolf to model some jewelry?”
A sick weight fills the pit of my stomach. “Maybe the hunters had someone that was…tested on. Because unless one of the úlfhéðnar was working with them—”
“Yeah,” Ethan agrees grimly. “And your parents sound like good people. So maybe the reason they left wasn’t just a disagreement with the direction that the new leader was taking them in.”
“Maybe,” I say softly. Hopefully.
Ethan falls quiet for a moment, giving the swing another little push. “Where’s this mine, then?”
“The entrance is up near Rudder’s place. But it’s sealed up. Jonas made sure it was after I was… After—” And I can’t. My lungs start caving in as memories flash by, of the screams and the bony spider and the skittering of something through the dark, probably just mice but if I’m locked in there long enough they’ll gnaw me down to nothing, there’d be nothing to find—
“Hey, now.” Warm hands cup my cheeks and Ethan’s rough voice begins pulling me out. “Breathe, Makena. Breathe.”
My gaze locks with his. The panic attack has closed up my chest but there’s the light ahead, shining with that soft amber glow, and I can see my way out.
Ethan.
My breathing eases, but the shivers set in, shaking me violently against him. He frowns, rubbing at my
arms, my bare legs.
“You’re freezing.”
No. I’m just…rocked. To my very core.
Jerkily, I pull my legs away from his hands. He goes still, watching me.
“You’re okay?”
I nod, then stumble over a simple, “I’m just going— Going to go inside. And get a blanket.” Though I’m not cold. I’m just running away…again. “But I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll wait for you,” he says.
14
Makena
How can realizing that you are absolutely safe with someone make you more terrified than ever?
I don’t know the answer to that. But that’s exactly what happened. With his strength and his warmth, Ethan pulled me out of a panic attack—
—and dragged me straight to the edge of falling for him.
Stopping in the middle of the living room, I look blindly around, my heart thundering in my chest. Because I ran away from him. Because I could feel myself falling and I thought, If I just get away, I’ll be safe. But I know that I won’t be. I knew it from the very beginning. Ethan is going to do so much damage to my heart.
So what can I do now? Keep pushing him away? Keep fighting it?
I don’t know.
Breath shuddering, I force myself to move. I came in here for a blanket, supposedly. So I swipe the quilted throw from the sofa—and abruptly stop, my gaze arrested by the framed photograph propped on the fireplace mantel.
My parents and me. Taken when I was sixteen, at the high school gym shortly after a varsity volleyball game. I’m sweaty and laughing, standing between them with my arms around their waists, and they’re both beaming at the camera—at Carrie, who’d taken the photo for us.
Just a moment in time, but there were so many moments like this. And less than a year later, they were dead.
My heart clenches as I focus on my mother’s face. Of my parents, she was always the one who pushed me harder, punished me more severely, and expected more out of me. She also loved me unreservedly.
So she wouldn’t be disappointed that I’d skipped college, because she would see how hard I work, how much I’ve done to continue improving the ranch. She’d have been proud of what I’ve accomplished. But she probably would have also sat me down and pointed out something that I didn’t even realize, until tonight.
