by Selena Scott
And that’s when they smelled it. Blood on the air. Oh God. That was animal blood. And there was nothing in season right now. These men were hunting, in the night, on a full moon. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out exactly what they were hunting for.
The voices had quieted but to Bauer’s chagrin, both of the wolves beside him started licking their chops at the scent in the air. Wolves were hunters, but they were also scavengers. If there was a fresh kill somewhere left for dead, they would want to go see about it.
Before he could stop them, the two wolves had taken off running in chase of the blood. He took off after them, pushing himself to move faster, to get there.
They were younger and faster, but not stupid. By the time Bauer caught up to them, they were hidden at the edge of a clearing, still licking their chops, crouched and watching the group of men gathered around something.
“How do we know if it’s a shifter or not?” one man asked another.
“Don’t they shift back if you kill it?”
“No, that’s urban legend.”
“Then how do we know?”
“I told you, we have to haul it back and turn it in to the feds.” This was from a smaller member of the group. Small, but mean. He had a craggy face, brutally short hair and angry eyes. He looked like he was about two seconds away from kicking the carcass in front of him.
“How’d you know that, Race?” one of them asked the small, mean-looking man.
“I know it because I been talking to a fed whose been poking around here since they found that body at the reservoir. They’ll do DNA testing on this mountain lion and figure out if it’s a shifter or not. But make no mistake. It’s a shifter. What else would be out and so bold on a full moon?”
The men shuffled around a bit and that’s when Bauer got a glimpse of what they were all huddled around. He’d known it was a dead animal, but sure enough, there was a mountain lion, golden, lying on its side and curled forward. A pool of blood wet the forest floor beneath it.
Bauer’s heart raced with the danger of the situation. Not only for him, but for the boys beside him as well. He looked over at them and saw that there was no longer a wild hunger in their eyes. They no longer panted after the blood on the air. Instead, they watched the men with caution in their eyes, wariness.
Bauer, careful not to startle them, nudged at their shoulders. They needed to get out of here. Seth took a few steps away, following Bauer, but Raphael stayed behind, still staring at the men with guns standing over the body of a beautiful animal.
Bauer went back and nudged Raphael again and this time the wolf instinctually butted back at him, a low growl in his chest. The men in the clearing froze as fast as Bauer did.
“Did you hear that?”
“A growl?”
The thin, bright beam of a flashlight swept the woods to their left and then directly over the three animals, catching the reflective orbs of their eyes.
Shit, Bauer barely had time to think.
“There’s animals out there!”
“Wolves, I think!”
A shot split the air and part of the tree above Seth’s head exploded like a firework. The boys jolted and Bauer nipped at them to get them moving, and fast.
They took off at a sprint through the woods, the men shouting and tearing after them, crashing through the brush. Every few moments another shot would explode around them.
There were two things that Bauer was grateful for. One, the boys were smart enough not to run back in the direction of their home. And two, they were fast. They were already twenty feet in front of him, now twenty-five.
Bauer was much faster than the men on foot, but he was feeling his age in his joints. He waited until the boys were just a little bit further through the woods and then he deviated from the path they were running on, made a little bit of extra noise. He heard the men crashing after him instead of the boys and he was glad. He let loose a war-like growl.
Bark exploded to his right as one of the men took aim at him. And then there was a blinding pain in his left haunch and he knew he’d been hit.
Hit but not dead, he thought and kept moving. The pain increased as his speed decreased. They were going to catch him soon.
Luckily there was a stream ahead that Bauer knew. He crossed it quickly, the water bitingly cold on his paws. On the opposite bank was an outcropping that was almost cavelike. He was just small enough to fit there without being seen.
He had just finished pressing himself back, hiding himself from sight, when the boots of the men’s feet came into view, splashing into the creek. He wanted to keep watching, but he knew that the reflections in his eyes would give him away if they swept their flashlights his way. So, he closed his eyes, and tucked his snout under one foot, hoping his fur would camouflage him into the gray brown rock around him.
After a few moments, he heard the frustrated noises of the men.
“We lost it.”
“Yeah, but I got it in the back leg. It’s out here somewhere.”
“Then it’ll die out here somewhere, too. We’ve got our work cut out for us dragging that lion back down the mountain.”
And then their noises receded, their scents along with it. The pain in Bauer’s back leg was pounding, but not sharp. In a way, it was almost soothing. Pain had been his constant companion for so many years that he almost welcomed it.
He was warm there and protected under the outcropping. His eyes drifted closed and his consciousness drifted away.
***
Bauer opened his human eyes when he felt a dog’s cold nose against his forehead. He blinked up into the face of a very familiar wolf. Raphael was nosing him.
The boy was still shifted, which meant that the moon was still out. Bauer, however, had shifted back to his human form in his sleep, as he occasionally did. But only when he was injur—
“Yowch.” He winced as he tried to sit up, remembering the wound he’d sustained last night. The men. The hunters. The dead mountain lion.
He twisted and looked at the back of his leg. There wasn’t as much blood as he’d thought there’d be and with a few small inspections, he deemed that the bullet had grazed him, leaving behind a half-inch-deep trough in its wake. He tried to sit up again and groaned. Raphael’s wet nose pushed into his head again, harder this time.
In a different situation, Bauer might have been extremely wary of the untrained shifter wolf who was biting distance from his face. But now, he found he was simply too exhausted.
His eyes drifted closed again and didn’t come open until there was light flashing across his eyelids, turning them red. There were footsteps too, and a familiar voice cursing into the pre-dawn air.
He opened his eyes and saw the very edge of the sky lightening. He also saw two wolves and a woman crouching in between them, peering at him.
Elizabeth. She was here.
Which meant that Seth had gone to get her while Raphael had stayed with Bauer.
Even though his situation was far from good, he couldn’t help but feel proud of the boys. This was progress. This was a very far cry from completely feral animals. The training must have worked in some measure or another.
“How you feeling, old man?” Elizabeth asked, shining the flashlight at the ground to get it out of his eyes.
“Grand,” he groaned. He tried to sit up and failed, wincing as he curled onto his side. “Actually, I feel like an old, naked man who’s just been shot and is now lying in the freezing cold mud.”
She had the grace to smile at him. She inspected his wound with the flashlight. “It’s not infected yet.” She quickly taped a wad of gauze to the wound and then pulled a blanket out of a bag on her back. “Let’s get you warm while we wait an hour for these boys to shift back.”
She tucked the blanket around him and handed down a bottle of water. She sat close enough for him to absorb some of her heat and he figured that was intentional. She was a very smart woman, after all.
Looking up at her, with t
he blue morning on its way, Bauer was suddenly struck by the fact that she was attractive. He hadn’t thought much on it before. Perhaps it was just the bullet wound talking. But he had to admit that she had a nice look about her. Youthful, even in her age. Sharp, put-together.
He let his eyes drift closed again.
This time, when he woke up, it was because he was being slid onto a blanket as Seth and Raphael, in their human forms, each took an end. They lifted him into the air and immediately started down the mountain. He tried not to make things worse by wincing with each jostle.
“Wait,” he whispered after a few minutes. “Wait. I hear something.”
And sure enough, when the boys paused, they heard it, too. Footsteps and conversation just over a ridge to their left.
“We shot it a hundred yards back that way. Look there. You can see the blood. We should be able to track the animal. Or the shifter. Whatever it is.”
Bauer’s blood froze as he made eye contact with Elizabeth. “The hunters. I recognize their voices,” he whispered. “They came back. They’re going to be led straight to the outcropping.”
“And to all the tracks we just left behind,” she whispered back, her face leaching of color. Even an inexperienced tracker would be able to spot the mingling of coyote, wolf and human tracks. As if a preternatural calm were falling over her, she straightened her back and turned to her sons. “Get him down the mountain. I’ll double back and muddle the tracks.”
“Mom, no!” Seth said, his knuckles white where he held on to Bauer. “We’re not letting you stay up the mountain alone with a bunch of shifter hunters.”
“They’ll have no quarrel with me. And if they even see me, I’ll say I was out birdwatching. She dug in her bag and dragged out a pair of binoculars. She put them around her neck. “If they find you and Bauer, they’re going to figure it out, Seth. They’ll see his wound and put two and two together. They’ll know what Bauer is and they’ll probably know what you are. So get him down the mountain now.”
She didn’t stay to argue. She charged, as quietly as possible, back up the mountain.
“She’s right,” Bauer whispered. “If they see me shot in the ass and you boys half-dressed and looking like you’ve been rolling in dirt all night, they’re going to know what you are. They might even kill us. But the sooner you get me down the mountain, the sooner one of you can come back up and be with her. You hear?”
Raphael and Seth nodded and then moved double time down the mountain.
***
“What the fuck is this?” Jackson shouted as he met them in the kitchen, a bloodied and battered Bauer now lying on the floor. “What happened?”
“Bauer will explain,” Seth said as he grabbed a shirt from the laundry room and turned to sprint back up the mountain. He didn’t care that he was exhausted. Or that he was starving and thirsty and freaked as hell from his experiences last night. His mother was alone on the mountain with group of men who had no problem killing.
Fuck. That.
He was halfway across the backyard, Jackson shouting after him, when his mother broke through the trees that lined her backyard, panting and sweating, color high on her cheeks.
“It’s fine,” she told him. “I obscured the tracks and got away. They didn’t follow me.”
Seth strode to her and hugged her up, his thoughts whirring a mile a minute.
The next two hours passed in a strange, blurred high speed. Jackson stitching up Bauer’s wound, Raphael explaining to the family all the differences he’d felt in his shift. Seth trying like hell to keep a lid on things and failing.
He needed space. He needed normalcy.
His family seemed to know this and let him leave without too much protest. Seth stood in his shower at home until the water ran cold. He’d so wanted that shift to be different. To have some control over it.
And he’d had a few seconds at the beginning when he could almost taste what it would be like to have control. But then he’d lost it all. He’d been as wild as ever. He’d actually salivated over the blood of a murdered animal.
He remembered the mountain lion, lying in its own blood, and he felt sick. His stomach curdled.
He remembered the way he’d almost attacked Bauer at the beginning of the night. He remembered the way he’d fled from the hunters with no thought to Bauer. Leaving the old man behind to get shot.
If he’d been in his human mind, none of those things would have happened. But he hadn’t been. He’d been in his wolf mind. An animal. A beast.
He was so fucking sick of being dangerous.
Seth was exhausted from the night but he had work to do today, it was a weekday. So he got dressed and commenced with the longest workday of his life. Raphael showed up a half an hour later than Seth did and they didn’t speak to one another as they ripped up a section of a client’s yard.
They worked hard through lunch and finally quit around four. Seth felt as if he’d die if he didn’t hit a mattress in the next half hour.
If he wasn’t such a neat freak, he would have collapsed into his bed, but the idea of dirt on his sheets was so grotesque to him that he forced himself to bathe. He had just pulled on a pair of underwear when his doorbell rang.
He yanked on pants and stalked downstairs, his fatigue making him forget his manners as he yanked open the door.
“Hi—ohmygod—boyyoyyoyyoing,” Sarah said as her eyes bottomed out on his chest.
He barely had the energy for a smile.
“God, you’re beautiful,” she continued, her eyes traveling upwards. And then she got to his face. “Actually, strike that. You look like total crap. Seth, are you all right?”
“I’m just tired,” he told her.
“Okay,” she said, obviously not believing him. “I know you’re avoiding me, but I don’t care. I brought you some cookies that I bought, but am pretending I made. And some of that lemon-lavender juice you love so much but I think tastes like dish soap. And what else? Oh. I brought you a DVD of my favorite movie to watch and I figured you’d make me dinner. Because come on, I’m pretty bright, you’re a dinner-making kind of guy.” She held up the box of stuff she had. “It’s a date in a box. Don’t make me go back to my lonely house and do this date all alone.”
He blinked down at her. She was tan and honey-colored and in athletic clothes as usual, her hair in a wet bun on her head. She looked warm and soft and the memory of her taste danced on his tongue. He wanted to face plant into her and never resurface. This wasn’t fair. Last night should have been all the evidence he’d ever need to prove that he was way too much trouble for her. But it had also exhausted him so much that all of his defenses were down. He couldn’t fight it. He couldn’t fight her.
He stepped back to let her inside and sort of swayed on his feet.
“Jeez. Or maybe I should come back later after you’ve slept?”
“No,” he heard himself say. “A movie sounds great.”
He led her back to his living room, telling himself that he’d order food for them in a minute, and collapsed onto the couch, motioning listlessly to the television. He yanked an afghan over him and leaned back.
Moments later, he felt Sarah’s heat beside him and then her hand on his forehead. She was saying something to him, but everything just sort of melted together and floated away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sarah did end up having that date all by herself. But she did it with company. She watched the DVD with 200 pounds of very hot man wrapped around her, snoozing away. And when she said hot, she meant it in every way. She checked over and over to see if he was running a fever, because his head on her collarbone, his thighs laid over top of her legs, the flat of his hand against her hip? It was all burning freaking hot.
The couch was large and deep, but still, in order for them both to fit, they were sandwiched together. Seth didn’t seem to mind. And Sarah certainly didn’t mind. She was hungry, but she didn’t want to get up and lose her place on the couch, so after the movie, she jus
t let herself drift off to sleep. She woke up at dawn the next morning and Seth was still plastered against her.
Thankfully, he’d shifted most of his weight off of her, but he was still touching her stem to stern, on his side while she laid on her back, his arm across her waist, her head tucked under his chin.
From the best she could tell, he was still sleeping. She wondered what the heck he’d done that had made him sleep pretty much from five in the evening until five in the morning. She’d stayed up a few hours later than him, but still, she was ready to get up and go.
She liked cuddling as much as the next person, but this was excessive. Besides, in the morning, she was an up and at ‘em sort of girl. She wanted to brush her teeth, she wanted a cup of coffee and then she wanted to hang out with Seth until he needed to go to work.
She slid out from his grasp and found her way to the bathroom in the dim light of early morning. She blinked against the lights when she turned them on and gasped. She hadn’t known it was possible for a bathroom to be this lovely.
The glassed-in shower had pristine white tiling and a frosted window shelf where a few shockingly green houseplants flourished, practically tumbling down the wall. The floor was done in big dark tiles and the toilet was one of those fancy, oblong jobs. The countertop was also dark, to offset the bright white walls, and the faucet made the water look as if it were falling smoothly from almost thin air. But the best part was the lighting. He’d arranged ten tiny lamps from the ceiling to cast a sort of prismed glow on the mirror, making one’s reflection look absolutely lovely.
Sarah looked in the cabinets for a spare toothbrush and found one. She brushed her teeth and took her hair out of her bun, finger brushing it as best as she could. She meant to go make coffee for them both but sidetracked back into the living room when she saw that Seth was stirring awake on the couch.
“Morning,” she said as he rubbed at his eyes with his free hand. He lifted his hand away and just stared at her.
