by Mark Henwick
My nose twitched.
Pasadena!
I was amazed she’d been let out. But then, maybe it was a callous test on the part of the LA Were, to let a female halfy go and test whether this ritual was safe.
“Hold her up,” I said.
The halfies on either side took her arms.
I licked the gash on her forehead. I felt the bitter flavor of aniatropics flood my mouth. A trembling eagerness in my jaw.
I had to distract myself from that. Biting wouldn’t go down well tonight.
She needed something. Something visual.
I ran a thumb across the blood and saliva, smeared it across my eyelids and the bridge of my nose, a bar of red, dark and glistening. Copied that on hers. Blinked at the mark across our faces which felt right. Felt part of the ritual, part of this place.
“There,” I said softly. “See? Sisters. What’s your name?”
“Paige,” she said, her voice breaking.
“Walk with me, Paige.”
Something seemed to catch in the air, like a flame in tinder, spreading out from us. The halfies sighed.
The girl gritted her teeth and staggered behind me, steadying herself with a hand against me. Trusting me.
And as the last of the Denver pack and the companions disappeared back into the tree line, I made my way to the final halfy, hunched over and head-down at the end of the group.
And smelled the guilt coming off him. Now, that was a different emotion.
The guy was a hand-span shorter than me. His unkempt hair looked as if it might be blond or light brown. He looked about twenty. His body had a solidity to it, a tension. It reminded me of someone.
I’d frozen, partway into giving him a hug, and he sensed it. I drank in his scent, tilted my head for a better look at him.
“You okay?”
He ducked his head and muttered something.
I lifted his chin.
Once he realized he’d gotten my full attention and I wasn’t going away, he stood straighter. A feeling of resignation replaced the guilt. But this guy could meet my eyes, where most of the halfies couldn’t.
“Where you from?” I asked.
“Vegas.” His voice was quiet, the word bitten off as if he wouldn’t say one more thing than he had to.
I looked him up and down. His clothes looked as if he’d climbed Falcon’s Bluff from the steep side. Given his emotions, that was probably exactly what had happened. I had a gatecrasher.
And I knew who he reminded me of.
“You’re in the right place by complete accident, you know,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Why’d you climb up?”
“I’m a halfy.”
“No, I mean everyone else came in the front door. Why’d you come in the back?”
His shoulders wanted to slump, but he wouldn’t let them. Our conversation was private, but his eyes took in Yelena at my shoulder and fear edged everything else out.
“No pack.”
“Ah. So, no invite from Felix. What’s your name?”
“Lynch.”
“Well, Lynch, thing is, you’re no half-wolf.”
He frowned.
The poor guy looked so confused, I had to take pity on him. Didn’t stop me from laughing.
“We need to find Nick,” I said over my shoulder. “We have another oddball here.”
“I’m right here,” Nick said from behind me.
Damn, he’d crept up on me.
I turned.
The bonfires had been lit. The glow shone on half of Nick’s face, leaving the other half in darkness. The single lit eye gleamed. Nick reached across me and pulled Lynch closer. His nostrils flared and his face rippled. I saw a glimpse of cat’s eye. His skin seemed to go tawny, but maybe that was a trick of the light.
His laugh rumbled deep in his chest.
“Yes, you better stay close to me, little cat,” he said.
As he led the dazed were-cougar halfy away, he growled, “Thanks, Boss.”
What was he thanking me for? Not throwing Lynch’s skinny ass back down the hill? He thought I’d consider that?
And since when had he called me Boss?
Maybe Nick had decided he was in. When I’d asked him a month ago, he had been unsure whether he fit into Pack Deauville and House Farrell. Boss sounded like he’d made a commitment.
More seriously, I had to find out more about Lynch. For him not to know what bit him and to have been abandoned to find his own way sounded like a rogue was operating there. Rita might have some advice, since it seemed she’d had a similar start. Maybe that was the were-cougar way, but if it was, I didn’t like it.
Meanwhile, I had a ritual to attempt.
I felt a chill in my belly.
I’d been in the same state last time. Before the ritual in Carson Park, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do and whether I could do it. It was all supposed to be a scam to delay Amaral, until Olivia had suddenly gotten close to the critical point.
This time I had a large group of halfies, and it wasn’t like Olivia, who had blindly trusted me. Her last hope before she died. This group—pack—were strangers who’d never met me before tonight, who were all scared, and who were all at different stages.
What of the ritual only worked for someone who was at the critical point?
Even if it worked for them, would I have to keep repeating the ritual for the others?
No time to think about things like that.
“Make a ring around me. Stand closer,” I said, raising my voice and stealing the Belles’ joke. “I don’t bite. Much.”
That got some snickering at the back from my team.
Yelena’s eukori still flowed through me, connecting me to everyone here. There was a solid core of belief—Ursula and Olivia, Nick and Yelena, Ben and the mix of Cimarron, Denver and Cheyenne cubs that had helped me at the last ritual. It was like a beacon in the cold night, beating back the fear, doubt and despair that churned in the halfies.
I was missing someone: Martha. Not her belief, not her passion, but her quietness and spirituality in the heart of the storm. How much did I need that? Was she the rock that had anchored the ritual?
I didn’t know, but I guessed I was about to find out.
The halfies shuffled. Heads kept ducking. Eyes refused to meet mine. Their breath came hard, with a harmonic to it almost like whining. Pack signals that meant help me.
They didn’t believe in themselves. Their packs didn’t believe in them.
Behind me, my adopted halfy Paige was keeping herself upright by holding on to me, pressing her face against me, wolf-like. She was probably smearing blood on my shirt, but I’d take that. She believed. Something had passed between us.
I guessed I needed to channel some Top first, before we got to the ritual. Master Sergeant Gabriel Luther Wells had taken a group of us, half-trained, self-doubting soldiers and transformed us. And he’d started with a speech about believing in ourselves.
“I can’t change you,” I said. “And I can’t make you change.”
Heads came up. Fear blooming in the night. That wasn’t what they wanted to hear.
“It’s not me. It’s not my voice. It’s not this rocky hill.”
I walked the little circle they’d left me, around and around. I pulled the necklace clear so they could see it, focus on it.
“It’s not the necklace either.”
A sigh passed through them.
“Your ability to change comes from inside you. Everything you can achieve comes from inside you. All we’re doing tonight is helping you find that ability. And the first step on that path is to put aside your doubts and fears.”
Better.
It hadn’t magically dispelled their fears, but they were listening, they were focusing. The discordant Call lost a little of its screechiness.
“Everyone is here to help. That includes each of you, and the person standing next to you. All helping each other,” I said, meeting eyes here and
there in the crowd. “Take a moment. Look at the people around you.”
Heads swiveled and a there were even a few tentative smiles.
“The people around you are your buddies. They are as important to you as you are to them. Because if you stumble, they will lift you back up; and if they stumble, you will lift them back up.”
Firelight gleamed in eyes. I had their attention now.
“Ask their names. Tell them you will lift them back to their feet, as you would for any of your pack. Swear it. Because tonight we are one pack.”
Whoops. My mouth was dragging me right off the reservation here.
But damn, if it wasn’t working. The Call didn’t exactly get mellow and harmonic, but the background of tension between packs just went away, as they all self-consciously muttered to each other.
So much for prepping them.
Now to remember how I’d done it. Remember how it felt.
Yeah. How it felt on the brink of going rogue.
That sounded so like Tara snarking in my mind.
I could have used some of her snark now. Where was she?
I have to do this.
I tried to concentrate.
Think about achievable goals.
If I could just reach a dozen of them. A dozen saved. Maybe I could try again tomorrow.
I opened myself, feeling for the energy.
But there was no magic. No sensation of sand or flames slipping through me that I knew from Tullah’s lessons on channeling the energy.
What had Tara said?
We’re not the flame. We’re the wick.
Did that mean I didn’t need to feel the energy to use it?
The necklace under my fingers. Was I sensing the patterns written in it, or was it just the memory of the sensations?
Did I need the energy? Did I need the necklace?
The exchanging of names had died down.
Out of time.
“Dance, Skinwalker,” I said.
Nick shed his clothes. Without a moment’s hesitation, Yelena joined him. It rippled through my team. The halfies began undressing uncertainly. One or two, now that we were moving, seemed to lose coordination. Through Yelena’s eukori, I could feel the rising panic as some of those who were furthest gone slipped closer to critical.
“Help your buddies,” I said quietly.
The bonfires seemed to suck my words from me and cast them like smoke through the ranks.
Clothes were gathered by my team and thrown out into the darkness around us.
Going to be hell getting dressed after this.
Paige stripped and fumbled, helping me with my clothes.
Nick was silent so far, apart from the sound of his feet stamping the ground. He began to circle, too narrow for anyone else to join yet, but growing that circle each pass.
The halfies crowded around, stretching to see him. They’d heard all about it. The skinwalker, the dance. Even those that were drifting closer to their crisis lost their isolation, became part of the pack.
Nick flung his arms out, turned one way, back again, growing the circle of his dance even more.
He was an eagle. He hadn’t changed, but every set of eyes saw him as eagle. His movements captured the essence of being an eagle and threw it like a net over the halfies.
I shivered. Now I sensed the pull of energy, like a wind whipping across the clearing.
Nick started his chant, very low.
Yelena urged Lynch to try and match Nick’s dance, and followed behind him.
“Go,” I whispered, and gently pushed Paige to follow them.
One fearful backward glance and she went.
The cubs took up the chant and began shepherding halfies into the growing circle.
The next second Nick was a cougar, then a bear, then a buffalo. He didn’t physically change, he wore the same skin, but we all saw the essence of the animals in him.
The circle grew, taking on a life of its own. It passed outside the three bonfires, where flames leaped and tossed sparks upwards into the black sky.
The others couldn’t dance like Nick, but it didn’t matter. He led them. They copied him. A little of the magic of the dance flowed through everyone.
The smell of pine burning filled my nose. The roar of the fires blended with the chanting. It was warm. Smoke from the fires curled through the line, gathering a dancer here or there into its cloudy arms, releasing them again. The dance threatened to lose cohesion.
But the Call began to pulse within the chant. Everyone listened to the Call, pulling them forwards, keeping them in step.
And in the Call, there were no packs, no divisions. Nothing but the dance and pain, fear and courage, hope and despair, all twisted around each other.
We are one pack tonight, I’d said. I hadn’t meant it quite so literally.
I stayed at the center, feeling the press of expectation on me being shaken and cleared by the drumbeat of stamping and the ebb and flow of the chant.
My borrowed eukori showed me my team, even as the smoke obscured them. Nick and Ursula, Yelena and Olivia, Ben and all the others, whirling around me like stars.
And the presence of the place. The darkness waiting beyond the reach of the flickering light.
Sacred areas, Martha had called them.
Somewhere up here, the Denver pack had killed Alex’s girlfriend, Hope, and buried her. She hadn’t been able to change. Through Alex, I’d seen. I’d seen her screaming with pain, tearing her own flesh, begging them to kill her. How many others? Felix had been here since Denver was founded. And before him, the Arapaho peoples. Their wolf clan.
This whole hillside was covered in graves.
I could hear their voices on the wind, feel their touch.
Dance the spirits out of the air.
That was what I’d asked Nick to do last time. But they weren’t in the air. They were in the ground. The whole hill was alive with them. They slipped between the trees of the forest, blue streamers drifting in and out, as if the forest itself were breathing. Flowing like waves, like a tide, higher and higher, reaching up across the rocky expanse to join us.
Smoke billowed around the dance, stirred by the passage of bodies, spiraling, taking forms of its own that danced themselves up into the cold night air. Every foot that stamped down sent up a puff of smoke that shuddered with the dance and twisted into shapes. Figures wheeled in the flickering light of the bonfires, figures of smoke and cinders, figures with the bodies of humans and the heads of animals. Buffalo, moose and horse; bear, wolf and cougar. Horned and fanged. Cloud dancers, passing through and around and between the humans.
No one else seemed to see them.
And with every stamp, sharp rocks cut feet too used to boots and shoes.
We anointed the ground with our Blood.
Pain was the heart of the ritual. But not that pain.
Olivia had been in pain from her body’s attempts to change. I had been in pain from the torture that I’d endured.
Some of the halfies were feeling the same pains that Olivia had, but it wasn’t enough.
Last time, I’d called up imagery from my first change and thrust it at Olivia. This time it wasn’t enough. I pushed it at the halfies and it seemed to slide past them and lose its form like the cloud dancers.
I gripped the necklace, but it had no more secrets. It had already told me that I would master my way.
How?
How to heal them?
The same words seemed to bubble out of the necklace, words in a language I did not know.
I will master my way.
Heal? Like I tried to heal Jen?
In desperation I stopped trying to push images at the halfies.
I reached through them all, right through them, to Olivia.
I found her memories of the ritual. The pain, the despair, the mind numbing shock as she fell, and while she fell, she changed.
More skilled than when I’d torn memories from Jen, I pulled. Pulled back through the group. And
her sensations and memories spread like wildfire through the tinder of the halfies’ minds.
Ben and the cubs felt it.
Nick felt it and changed. Cougar.
Ursula. Bear.
Olivia. Wolf.
Halfies struggled to stand with legs suddenly bending the wrong way, tried to catch their falling friends with hands that had no fingers, tried to shout with voices that soared instead into the sky.
My head changed. Scents suddenly became more complex and layered. The dark was streaked with heat that I could see.
I howled and a great shout erupted from the tree line.
Were emerged, shedding clothes and changing. Blurs streaked up the hill to join the turmoil of new wolves emerging from the smoke.
And, in front of me, stood my own cloud dancer.
I shed my wolf.
In the depths of the night, living in the flickering light of the bonfires, I saw her as I’d seen her in Alex’s photo, the image I held in my heart so that she would never be dead. She was bronzed and raven-haired, cloaked in sun and laughter.
“Hope,” I said.
She stood in front of me and I ached to hold her, with a memory of pain and a desire to comfort that was Alex’s.
“Sister,” I whispered. “Sister-wife.”
She seemed to rush at me. I opened my arms, but I could not hold her. A freezing wind blasted through me, coldest on my lips, my cheeks. On the tears leaking from the corners of my eyes.
“Amber? Amber? Are you okay?”
Chapter 37
Bitter Hooks was chaos after the ritual. Even the Denver pack who’d seen the original ritual in Carson National Park had harbored doubts.
Maybe it’d been a coincidence.
Maybe Olivia had just changed on her own.
Maybe this was going to be a disaster for the Denver pack.
However it had happened, and no one asked me what I thought, tonight’s ritual had been a complete success. Even our gatecrashing were-cougar, Lynch, had changed, though I definitely credited that to Nick rather than me.
Bitter Hooks shivered to the sounds of werewolves tearing up and down through the forest for the joy of it. Werewolves don’t usually howl, but tonight was an exception.
I managed to find Ben, leader of the cubs, and like the rest of my team, a complete believer from the start. They had more faith in me than I had in myself. I got him to change back to human and promise to get every name, every contact number for the former halfies and make sure each of them had the others’ information. Sort of like a graduation ceremony. Their alphas might not like it, but while I was hot news, no one was going to challenge my requests. After all, I wasn’t weakening their bonds with their packs. Just making sure they had connections to other packs.
