by Lauren Esker
As they climbed, the sun was lost completely behind a dark gray bank of clouds. A chilly wind raised goosebumps on Casey's arms.
"Looks like rain's on its way in," Jack said.
"Is that good or bad?"
"Could be both." He concentrated on navigating a tricky stretch of rocks for a minute. "In the plus column, rain'll wash out our trail. Make it harder for the pride to find us."
"And the downside?"
"It'll be cold. In the sunshine, as long as we keep moving around, we can avoid hypothermia. Rain and wind could be a lethal combination."
"Ray of sunshine," she muttered, but her heart wasn't in it. She liked that he was willing to be honest with her about their situation.
"Hey. Careful." Jack pulled her to one side. She wasn't sure what the danger was—the ground looked comparatively clear—until he pointed up into the tree she'd been about to walk under.
"What am I looking for?"
"Yellowjackets. Big wasps. I can hear 'em. See a nest up there anywhere?"
She leaned forward. Now that he mentioned it, the whole tree was humming faintly. "What does it look like?"
"Gray. Round."
She glimpsed it finally, a globe halfway up the tree, and pointed it out to Jack. "Are they vicious?"
"Not if you don't bother them. Leave them alone, they'll leave you alone. But you really don't want to go messing with them. Especially naked," he added.
"Too bad we can't drop it on the Fallons."
"Hmmm." Jack looked interested. "The tricky thing would be luring them in."
"I'd rather not get that close to a lion ever again." She gave him an assessing look. Although scratched and dirty, he didn't seem quite as pale as he had been. "How are you holding up?"
"I'm all right," Jack said. "Shifter healing, you know."
She did know, but she also suspected her accelerated healing was the reason why she was suddenly so hungry, as her body worked at double-speed to repair the damage to her feet and legs. Jack must be starving.
Still, he didn't say anything about it, so neither did she. They kept moving.
They were high enough now that, through gaps in the trees, she could see the beaver lakes in the other valley strung out like beads on a necklace. Jack was right—the little valleys with their attendant streams radiated down from the hills. Or mountains, really, not a match for the higher Cascades, but still pretty respectable in size.
"How rich do you have to be, to buy an island this big?" she marveled.
"And then use it for hunting folks," Jack remarked dryly.
"Seriously! You could build a resort and make a bucketload off tourists, or—"
A tawny flash in a clearing below them made her freeze in a moment's panic, clutching Jack's hand tighter. But then the animal emerged all the way and she could see it was only a deer. Head upraised, it scented the wind and then began delicately nibbling at a bush.
"Something?" Jack asked quietly.
"Deer. That's all." She sighed. "I wish we could catch it somehow. I'm hungry enough it looks tasty."
"If we weren't cuffed together, you'd be able to hunt."
"So would you," she pointed out. "Maybe getting the handcuffs off should be a bigger priority."
"I meant to look for something to pick them," Jack said. "A twig isn't going to cut it, though. This is where finding an old hunter's cabin or something would come in real handy." He frowned. "Come to think of it, there must be some kind of accommodations somewhere on the island."
"Why?"
"Well, think about it. The Fallons come up here regularly. My guess would be it's not just for this kind of thing, but also to hunt deer and other animals. You're a predator shifter too; you understand that sometimes your prey instincts need to be let out to play."
She nodded. "But if they come here to hang out as lions, what makes you think they'd have anything to accommodate their human bodies?"
"For one thing, they have to get here somehow. So at the very least, there's a helipad or a dock somewhere around. And sure, they could go back to civilization stinking and filthy and covered with blood, but that's not terribly likely for a bunch of rich guys, don't you think?"
Casey thought about Roger Fallon, from what she'd seen of him in the office. He was a big, outdoorsy guy, more given to wearing T-shirts than suits and ties, but that wasn't terribly uncommon in the Seattle business scene. He was always clean, though, with a sharp haircut. "Okay, you have a point. So if there is a hunting lodge or something, where is it? Not on this side of the island, unless it's well hidden. I haven't seen anything like that."
Jack began singing softly. After a moment, Casey recognized that he was singing the old children's song "The Bear Went Over the Mountain":
The bear went over the mountain
The bear went over the mountain
The bear went over the mountain
To see what he could see.
"And what did he see?"
"The other side of the mountain, of course," Jack said. "That's all there is to see."
"Which might have a hunting lodge on it."
"With phones," he said, and shook the cuffs, making them rattle. "And tools to get these fucking things off."
"And lions in it," she pointed out.
"Not if they're out hunting us."
While they were talking, they'd broken out of the trees and were now picking their way across the windswept upper slopes of the mountains. The ground was bare and rocky, punishing on their bare feet. Cold winds tugged at them, and thunder rumbled occasionally. Even in human form, she could smell the wet, sweetish scent of the coming rain.
The area around Seattle wasn't like this. Casey's experience outside the city was limited, but she'd been hiking on the Olympic Peninsula a few times. Down there, the forest had big trees draped with moss, and well-groomed trails.
This place felt much more lonely and wild. In the woods below, the trees were less grand and more tangled together, the bushes thorny and uninviting. And up here, on these mountain slopes, it felt like they'd gone back in time to a world where no humans existed.
But even as she had that thought, her eye snagged on something squarish in the trees below.
"What?" Jack asked. "See something?"
"Remember how we were talking about hunting lodges? I think I see something." She wished she had binoculars. Although it was midday, the light had grown as dim as evening, with a flat gray quality that made it hard to distinguish one thing from another. "Down there. A roof." She pointed.
"Do you see smoke, lights, anything that makes it look like anyone's home?"
She shook her head.
"Probably good. Anyone we'd run into would be bad news, most likely." Jack sighed, and Casey noticed how exhausted he looked. She was pretty worn out herself, but Jack looked weary to the bone—probably a mix of being in pain, and his body cannibalizing itself in an attempt to heal his injuries.
Far-off thunder rumbled again. Casey looked up. The oncoming rain was visible now, a dark blue-gray wall that had already obscured the ocean and was in the process of swallowing the valleys below them.
At first she mistook the lion's distant roar for another peal of thunder—then, an instant later, as the reverberations died away across the hills, she knew it for what it was. Immediately, another one took up the refrain. This time it didn't stop; they roared back and forth until the woods rang with it.
"Guess they found Derek," Jack said grimly.
Her mouth went dry. "Which means they're on our trail now."
"Shit," Jack muttered. "We need to find somewhere defensible. Fast."
Chapter Ten
Jack scanned the treeless ridge around them, squinting to try to sharpen the blurred shapes of distant rocks. No cover—but the lions wouldn't have that either.
Think, Ross. They'll be coming up the mountain straight after you. They'll be angry and moving fast. They can tell from the blood smell that you're hurt. How do you use that to your advantage?
Now he just needed to figure out another.
"Caves or cabin?" Casey asked. Her face was white, her voice taut, but she showed no sign of panicking.
"Which one's closer?"
"Caves, I think," she said, looking up the slope.
But it was uphill, therefore slower going. And, though the caves might offer better shelter, the cabin was more likely to have something they might be able to improvise into a weapon.
"Cabin," he decided.
Casey looked at him expectantly. Waiting for him to take up the lead, he realized after a moment. Jack gave her a gentle push.
"You're the one who can see it. You'll need to get us there."
They scrambled downhill, at a diagonal slant across the hillside. All the little creeks that made big valleys farther down the slopes had their headwaters here, which mean constantly climbing in and out of shallow ravines, with tiny trickling streams at the bottom. In a heavy rain, Jack thought, those would turn into raging torrents. Something else to watch out for.
They entered the trees again. It was mostly pines and spruce on these high slopes, their branches tossing in the wind. Casey kept stopping to look downhill, checking their progress. "I can't see it anymore," she said.
"Try to find a landmark. A ridge or a gully or something near where you saw it, something you can still see and take your bearings from. See anything like that?"
She hesitated, then nodded.
"Good. Go."
***
The first fat drops of rain struck them as they stumbled out of the sparse woods into the overgrown backyard of the old cabin.
It was hard to say what it had been built for. Jack guessed it was probably a hunter's warm-up cabin, or maybe somebody's half-assed attempt at homesteading, before the land had been bought by the Fallons.
The roof was a sheet of corrugated metal, overgrown with moss and half fallen in. A tin stovepipe stuck up from the intact section of roof, with an incongruous tree growing out of it. The log walls still looked pretty solid, though one of them had slumped, bending in the middle as if it was slowly melting. No glass remained in the windows, just the wooden slats that had once held it in place.
"Careful," Jack said as they padded toward the cabin, wading through chest-high Queen Anne's lace and other meadow weeds. "Could be nails or glass underfoot. How are you on your tetanus shots?"
"This is a fine time to ask me that. Have you seen the state of my feet lately?"
"I'd rather not see your foot with a nail through it, is the main point."
And then his foot plunged through something rotten and yielding. There was a sudden shocking sense of space underneath him. Jack yelled and threw his weight the other way, falling against Casey. She grabbed him and they both staggered backward until Jack caught his balance. Then they stared at the gaping dark hole where his foot had gone through. The ragged edges of old boards were visible under the moss.
"What the hell is that?" Casey wanted to know, her voice shaking.
"Old cellar, I think." Now that he was looking at it, he could see how the weeds dipped slightly in the area he'd stepped onto. "Maybe the top of an old well or septic tank."
He knelt down, bringing Casey along with him, and fingered the splintered edges of the old boards where they'd broken beneath his foot. Knocking a clod of dirt off the edge, he tilted his head and listened to it thunk wetly against the unseen bottom of the hole.
"Are you okay?" Casey asked.
"Basically." The sudden movement had dislodged what was left of the moss dressing on his arm, but shifter healing had already closed the edges of the injury well enough to keep it from bleeding. He felt totally wiped out, exhausted and aching with hunger.
But he'd dealt with this before, in other places, other parts of the world. He knew his limits better than most people did, knew how far he could push himself before it was too much. And he wasn't there yet. But there would come a time when he couldn't demand more of his body because it simply had no more to give.
Avery, dammit, you always said I didn't know how to rely on other people. Well, partner, I'm counting on you to save my ass this time, because I don't think I can get either of us off this island without you.
"Jack?" Casey asked softly, with a nervous glance at the dark forest around them. It was raining harder now.
"Yeah." He took a handful of loose grass and covered the hole he'd made. The first scattered pieces of a plan were jostling around in his mind, starting to come together into a useful shape.
Together the two of them circled the cabin, feeling their way carefully and staying alert for hidden traps. Down the hill to their left, water rushed in a brush-choked gully—no point in digging a well with all these mountain streams to choose from. Rain pattered lightly all around them, and thunder cracked loudly, not far off.
In the front yard of the cabin, an old oil drum was rusting away in a tangle of nettles. The cabin door hung open on rusty hinges.
Jack put Casey behind him and peeked inside to make sure they weren't setting themselves up for an ambush. "Safe," he told her, and they scuttled under the intact section of the roof just as the sky opened up and dumped a waterfall of rain on top of them.
The only intact piece of furniture that remained in the old cabin was a small, rusty potbelly stove, with moss growing on top of it and leaves poking out the half-open ash grate. Other than that, it was empty except for drifted leaves and an old table made out of two planks, with one end slotted into the cabin wall and the other fallen through the slats of a broken crate. The collapsed roof slanted down to the middle of the dirt floor, forming a makeshift lean-to with long grass and weeds growing around it. It was leaking in a dozen places, water dribbling through rust holes and around the edges to form slowly deepening puddles around their feet. But the walls stood intact all around them, providing a sense of security that Jack reminded himself was an illusion.
He tried to close the door, but years of coastal rains had frozen the hinges three-quarters of the way open. Frustrated, he applied a thrust of bearish strength. The hinges cracked and the top one came off in a shower of rust, leaving the door tilted drunkenly against its frame.
Good going, Agent Ross.
"Jack," Casey murmured. She pointed up. He looked. In the dimness it was hard to see what she was pointing at, but the humming gave it away. There was another yellowjacket nest up there.
"It's okay," he said, because Casey had gone tense next to him. "Just try not to bother them, and they won't bother us." I hope.
"Fellow refugees from the rain," she said, casting nervous glances up at the nest as they began to search the cabin for anything useful. "Are there such a thing as insect shifters, do you know?"
"There are a handful, but not many that I know of. Maybe they just stay under the radar better than the rest of us."
Rain thundered on the old metal roof, dripping down around them. Casey was beginning to shiver, and Jack felt needles of ice crawling down his spine, up his legs. His arm ached horribly. Hypothermia was going to be more of a problem than the lions soon. He knew various ways to make a fire without matches, but few that were likely to be effective in a torrential downpour.
Lightning flashed overhead with an almost simultaneous boom and crack of thunder. Casey jumped, dropping a handful of leaves she'd been sifting through for tools or other items.
"There's just nothing here," she groaned, scooping up another handful and throwing it at the wall. The rain caught the fluttering leaves and pounded them into the muddy ground.
"Yeah, looks like the place has been picked over pretty good. I doubt we're the first ... people to find it."
The first victims, he'd almost said, biting it off and switching in mid-sentence as he remembered that the last victim had been her best friend.
They di
d find a few things: a rusty can (Jack set it on the windowsill to catch rainwater), a broken glass jar, a rotted burlap sack. Jack shook this out to get rid of potential mouse nests or insects, and then draped it over Casey's shoulders. She gave him a look.
"If it bothers you from a feminist perspective, we can share," Jack pointed out. "No sense both of us falling over from cold, though."
"We're handcuffed together. If one of us goes down, the other—"
Jack's cuffed hand shot out, dragging hers along, and clapped over her mouth.
He wasn't sure what had tipped him off that they weren't alone. There was no way to hear anything over the sound of the rain. It was a sense beyond the usual five, an atavistic predator's instinct.
Jack took his hand off Casey's mouth and touched his finger to her lips. Then he leaned slowly out from under the dubious shelter of the collapsed roof to glance first through the doorway, and then out the window into the backyard.
Lightning flashed just as he did so, lighting up the dripping woods. For an instant, every blade of grass and water-bowed wildflower behind the cabin had its own sharp shadow. And it turned the lion at the edge of the woods to a great statue cast in molten silver.
The flash of light died on a thunderclap. Jack blinked against the afterimages. The lion was still there, standing belly-deep in meadow grass and flowers under the dull gray light of a rainy afternoon.
No, he thought. Not lion. Lioness. There was no mane. This was one of the Fallon sisters.
Just as he realized it, she shifted. The lioness's human form was a tall, statuesque naked woman, her limbs lean and muscular. Her long blonde hair was dark with water, plastered to her neck.
"I know you're in there," she called, pitching her voice to be audible above the rain. "I can smell you, little prey. And hear you."
Casey looked up at Jack, her eyes huge.
No sense in trying to hide their presence. Jack forced the cold-numbed fingers of his injured arm to work, grasping one of the timbers on the underside of the collapsed roof. His shoulder muscles bunched as he gave it a tremendous yank. Pain flared up his arm, but the rusty nails pulled out, leaving him holding a club about four feet long with nails sticking out crookedly all down its length.
