by Lauren Esker
"In what way?"
"In any way. Every kind of shifter has their own unique physiology and culture. How much do you know about wolf shifters?"
"Not much," Casey admitted. "I've never known any personally. As far as I know, they stick with their own kind, mostly. Like, the pack is everything?" She shrugged, a bit uncomfortably. "I knew, growing up, that there were several packs in the Cascades and on the eastern side of Oregon and Washington. But I guess I kind of always thought of werewolves as—okay, I shouldn't say this, he's your friend. And like I said, I never knew any personally."
"Hicks?" Jack suggested. "Rednecks?"
Casey squirmed. "I know, it's terrible of me! And it really is just a stereotype. I'd like to meet Avery and get to know an actual werewolf in person. I thought they stuck with their packs, though—like, they don't even really talk to people outside the pack? Maybe that's just a stereotype, too."
"It's not completely wrong. Wolf shifters are mostly rural and very, very family-oriented. Insular to an extreme. Lions and other social animals are all about the group bond, too, but wolves are maybe more so than any other kind of shifter. Mind you, I'm an outsider, so I don't know what it's like from the inside. I have friends and family and people I love, sure. But with werewolves, it's an all-encompassing kind of loyalty. They're loyal to death and beyond. The closest thing I can compare it to from my own life is the military bond."
"If that's so, then how did Avery end up in the SCB? It seems like he wouldn't want to be that far from his pack. Unless it's an urban pack?"
Jack shook his head. "Avery doesn't have a pack. Except us, I guess. I won't go into the details; I'll leave that for him to tell, if he wants to. But he had an absolutely miserable childhood. Werewolves are people just like anybody else, and some wolf packs are dysfunctional just like a lot of non-shifter families are. Like I said, the details are Avery's to tell, but like your friend Wendy, he grew up in the foster system."
Her eyes went soft with sympathy. "Poor Avery."
"Yeah, it's rough on anybody, but even more so for a wolf shifter, since family is everything to them. He bounced from one foster home to another, and never really had anyone to bond with. I think that's why he ended up going into the military, looking for a replacement pack, but that didn't work out for him either, obviously."
"Not your fault," she said immediately.
"Well, Avery clearly doesn't think so. The point is, though, that whatever it is that makes wolf shifters need a pack—instinct, emotion, whatever it is, while I was holding him and trying to stop him from bleeding to death in the desert, he latched onto me that way."
"Ah," she said.
"Yeah. I don't know what that actually feels like for a wolf shifter. I don't know if he thinks of me as a brother or a close friend or if it's even less comprehensible for non-werewolves than that."
"But he's in your life, for better or worse."
"Yeah; I'm just saying, if you and I try to make a go of it, you're probably going to get a lonely werewolf thrown in as part of the package. Not that Avery is clingy," he added quickly. "He really isn't, which I gather is kind of unusual for wolf shifters and probably something to do with how he grew up. But he's very attached to some of the people at the SCB. Very attached. And I'm the one he's most attached to."
Casey half smiled. "Jack, I told you how I grew up, right? I was desperately lonely. I would've killed for a brother or sister to share my life with. I would love to adopt your lonely werewolf buddy right along with you."
Jack laughed, though there was a melancholy note to it. He'd had girls say that before, that they didn't mind if he and Avery came as a sort of inadvertent package deal. They didn't always mean it. Or it was his past they couldn't handle, even if they thought they could at first. Or everything else that went along with it. One girlfriend broke up with him on the spot when they went back to his condo, started to get busy, and then she found out he had a knife in his boot and a gun taped to the underside of the dining room table. Good thing she hadn't checked for weapons in the bedroom ...
But none of that mattered unless they got out alive.
Let the future take care of itself, Jack. It's not like making plans makes any difference in the long run anyway.
Casey leaned into him and rested her head wearily against his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around her and held on tight, as if he could hold her here, could hold them both in this moment, forever.
Outside the cave, the rain was slackening. They would have to move soon. He didn't want to. He wanted to stay here, resting against Casey, forever. As if he could hold off the ending that he knew had to come.
He was finally almost warm.
"Wish I had the energy to do more than kiss you right now," Casey murmured against his shoulder.
"Me too. Rain check?"
"Rain check," she whispered, and brushed over his tattoo with her lips.
And even as he smiled against her hair, he wondered what the odds were that she'd actually come back to claim it.
You'll see when we get back to the city, Casey. You'll put this behind you, get whatever therapy you need to deal with all of it, and find a new job in an office somewhere. You don't fit in my world of violence and guns, hard choices and harder men.
You'll see.
He looked up to discover that the sun had broken from behind the clouds. Rain still fell lightly, each drop glimmering like a jewel backlit by the sun, but the storm was breaking up.
"We gotta move," he said, sitting up.
Casey reluctantly disentangled herself, brushing moss out of her hair. Jack sat up stiffly. Everything hurt, but the physical pain, he could deal with.
Not all of it was physical.
The important thing is getting out of here, he told himself. What comes after that will come. Nothing you can do about it.
Chapter Fourteen
Casey waited while Jack peered out of the cave. Then he nodded to her. "It's clear. C'mon."
They stepped out into a world washed clean. The sun winked at them through towering cliffs of clouds, and all around them, the entire mountainside glittered. All the little gullies and ravines were full of water; puddles gleamed atop every rock and on every spot of flat ground. From every tuft of moss, on each leaf of every small alpine plant, a bead of water hung like a little diamond. The air smelled fresh and wet.
"We shouldn't have waited so long. The rain was the biggest advantage we had." Jack sounded angry, but at himself, Casey hoped, not at her.
"We had to rest. We couldn't have gone on like we were."
In his human form, the extent of his injuries was shockingly visible. He'd been torn up on both arms, across his chest, down his sides. There were deep bite marks on one of his legs.
He still moved with the supple grace that was one of the first things she'd noticed about him, though. When he turned to look down the mountain, her eyes were drawn to the smooth play of the muscles on his back.
And, as tired as she was, her body responded to him. She could still feel the lingering heat of his lips on hers. God, in the cave, how she'd wanted—But, no. He was too badly hurt. They were in too much danger to let go and stop paying attention to their surroundings.
Yet.
Rain check, she thought, and ran the tip of her tongue over her lips, tasting him.
Most of the island was gone below them, lost in a wall of clouds that made her feel like she was standing on a much higher mountain. They were both already shivering in the clinging chill of the mist. Elsewhere on the mountain chain, dark walls of rain still obscured Casey's view—localized now, though, to isolated downpours. The bulk of the storm had passed over, and blue sky was visible in the oceanward direction.
Looking up the mountainside, Casey was surprised to realize they were almost at the top. "Should we see what's on the other side of the mountain?"
"We'd better."
The rocks were slippery, the wind wet and cold, so they both shifted by unspoken consent. Casey breathe
d deeply with relief at slipping back into her warm lynx fur, leaving the shivering human body behind.
The wet world was a wonderland of rich after-rain scents, but she couldn't smell any lions. Not yet.
She and Jack skirted around the rocky outcrop that sheltered the caves. From there, it was only a short scramble across steep rocks and loose scree to the summit. Jack crouched and crawled the last few yards on his belly. Casey followed suit, and together they peeked over.
It was much steeper on this side. The mountain fell away sharply, plunging down a frightfully steep slope—more of a cliff, really—to scattered patches of wind-gnarled pines attempting to eke out a living on its lower slopes. Long curling banks of mist crept below them, whipped by the wind into shaving-foam humps, concealing and revealing the crawling gray sea far below.
In front of them the sky was black, lit by brief flickers of lightning as the storm blew on inland.
In fact ...
Casey shifted. Her human vision was more acute at a distance than her lynx eyes. She wanted to see if she'd really seen what she thought she had, dimly glimpsed through the heavy curtains of rain.
"Jack!" she said, sinking her hand into his shaggy fur. "I can see land over there. I think it might be the mainland."
Jack shifted, so now she was gripping his bare arm. "How far?" he asked, squinting.
It was hard to gauge distance, especially through the rain. There wasn't much she could use to judge scale. She couldn't make out individual trees, or any features of the landscape at all, really. But it went as far as she could see in both directions, at least until it vanished into mist and rain.
"I don't think we could swim to it, if that's what you're thinking," she said dubiously. Lynx and bear could both swim, and wouldn't be as bothered by the cold water as humans, but she wasn't a particularly strong swimmer even in her lynx form.
"What else do you see?"
Right. Seeing-eye dog. "Cliffs below us," she said. "Trees farther down. It's really steep on this side. I'm glad we came up the gentle side, because I'm not sure if we could have climbed—Oh my God!"
"What, what?" Jack demanded, staring in the general direction she was looking, as if he could penetrate the blurry haze of the distance from sheer willpower alone.
"Jack," she said slowly, shading her eyes from the residual rain and trying to see better. "I think I know how we got to this island."
She'd only glimpsed it through the fog and clouds, and now she had to wait for the wind to move that stupid fogbank again and let her get a better look at what she thought she'd seen. Then the clouds below them tore open like a ripping sheet of paper, rolling back in slow motion, and there it was: a dock and a cluster of roofs, tiny as child's toys from up here. There was a white boat moored at the dock, sleek and teardrop-shaped. It wasn't the enormous private cruise ship that the Fallons had sailed out of Seattle's harbor—God, was it only yesterday? But this wasn't some fisherman's tiny skiff either.
And there was more. A little way back in the pines, a neatly rectangular green square had been cleared for a helipad. She knew it was a helipad because there was a toy-sized helicopter sitting in it.
She described what she was seeing to Jack as best she could, while the fog closed in again, draping a wet sheet over the sea and dock and scatter of buildings.
"It's so hard to tell scale from here. I can't tell if it's a giant resort and a huge boat, or just a few cabins and a little speedboat."
"And their own private helicopter," Jack said. "Don't forget that. Must be nice to be loaded."
Casey imagined their limp bodies being shoved out of the helicopter into the trees the previous night. She shuddered. "Can we steal it and fly out of here?"
"I don't know how to fly one," Jack said. "Boats, I can do. Can you tell if there's anyone down there?"
"I don't know. I didn't see anybody moving around or anything. But it's so hard to tell from here."
The sun broke out of the clouds just then and ignited a rainbow across the deep blue gloom of the retreating storm. A second ghostly rainbow shimmered below it. Casey had never seen a double rainbow before.
If she was going to believe in such things, it seemed like a good sign.
"We're going down there, aren't we?"
"No choice," Jack said. "It looks like that's the only place on this whole damn island that we can get what we need most."
"A way off."
"Or at least a way of getting a message out."
And to do it, Casey thought, they had to go into the actual lion's den itself.
***
They began the arduous climb down in shifted form, but had to shift out of their animal forms frequently, so they could use their human hands and dexterous toes to clamber across the scarier places.
Fog still draped the mountainside, and they often had no more than a few feet of visibility as they passed through bands of it. In a way it was merciful: it kept them from being able to see how far they had to fall if they lost their grip on the slippery rocks.
It was cold down here on the shadowy side of the hills. There were patches of blue sky overhead, but the sun was lost to them again, the rainbow having gently shimmered away to nothing after placing its tacit blessing on their plans.
The sun is setting, Casey thought. That must be the west over there.
They'd been out here for almost a whole day. Soon it would be night again. Lions were day hunters, Jack had said, but after they'd fought and bested two of them, Casey was pretty sure the Fallons wouldn't be observing any such niceties.
In evening's lengthening shadows, they paused to rest once they'd entered the trees. Jack was currently in bear form, and didn't bother shifting back; he just slumped into a bulky heap of fur, eyes closed.
He'd been limping badly, but there was nothing Casey could do. Besides, she was a mess herself. Shifting back to human shape, she stretched her sore limbs and studied the pink, healing lines of the cuts and scrapes on the lower part of her legs. Her feet were bruised and swollen. The small amount that she'd managed to eat in the cave was gone as if it had never been, leaving her stomach hollow as a beach ball.
On top of everything, having to shift repeatedly to navigate the slope had worn down what little energy the two of them had left.
At least they weren't thirsty. There were innumerable little streamlets coursing down the steep side of the mountain, as well as hundreds of puddles trapped on the tops of rocks. They'd been able to drink their fill, and Jack had encouraged it. The water helped fill their empty stomachs.
Maybe I should hunt, Casey thought. But taking the time, with pursuers on their trail, seemed like the height of folly.
Besides, that would involve getting up.
Instead she flopped on her back and gazed up at the sky. It was a crazyquilt of clouds and deep blue patches, stained now with traces of sunset's colors. Throughout their descent, small rain squalls had continued to sweep across them from time to time. They would have been sodden anyway, though. All the foliage was dripping and bent under a load of water it was happy to shed on fur, hair, or skin.
The last Saturday she'd ever spent with Wendy was a day like this, fresh and brisk and wet, with clouds and patches of impossibly vivid blue chasing each other across the sky. They'd gone to Pike's Market, carrying umbrellas to ward off the inevitable showers, then tempted fate and had a picnic in a park on the waterfront.
Casey hadn't enjoyed any of it much. She was stressed and overwhelmed by her job, and frustrated that her life had started to feel like she was spinning her wheels, stuck in one place. Wendy encouraged her to try a class or two at the University of Washington—U-Dub to locals.
"But I don't know what to study," she'd wailed to her friend. "I don't have any talents. There's nothing special about me. I'm twenty-five and I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up."
"That just means you have all the options in the world," Wendy had said. She leaned back on the park bench, the breeze tugging at her short hair
. There was a green stripe dyed down the side, the same rich jewel green as the trees. "See, I've always been good at computers, and now I have a job writing software for them. I always figured I'd do something like that as a career, and I was right. So I never really tried anything else. But you haven't found what you're good at yet. So you get to try everything."
"I don't think it works that way," Casey said, unwilling to be cajoled out of her misery. "For one thing, I've got to make money somehow while I'm off finding myself or whatever. Which means I can look forward to more shit jobs like this one. Besides, what if I'm not good at anything?"
"Now that's a defeatist attitude if I ever heard one."
"Come on, Wen. I can't Pollyanna my way out of this. You must have known computers were the thing for you, right? Like, it clicked or something. I don't have anything like that. I've never had anything like that."
Wendy wrinkled her nose in the way she had of laughing without actually laughing. "Have you heard the expression 'the perfect is the enemy of the good'? I like writing software, and I'm pretty good at it, but I don't think I'd call it a passion. Not everybody has a calling, and that's okay. You might never have a job that feels like you were born to do it, but you can sure as hell find something more satisfying and fulfilling than feeding overpriced burgers to stingy-tipping yuppies. Take a class. You might like it."
"I don't know. I'm so tired at the end of the day. The last thing I need is more work. And work I'm doing for free, on top of everything."
Wendy leaned forward, suddenly serious. "Look, Casey, I want you to promise me you'll at least go online and look through U-Dub's catalog and find some classes that look fun. You don't even have to sign up. Just write them down. The more frivolous the better, honestly. Find something that looks fun or cool or exciting. There are careers in literally everything. Didn't you say one time that you wanted to learn Spanish? There's jobs everywhere for translators and ESL teachers. You could learn to paint, or take a first-aid class, or try women's studies."
