I mean, it wasn’t like I was going to whip out a piece of paper and chicken scratch out my argument as to why I didn’t want to live out here alone.
Not that I could even spell alone.
In his sleep, the man was beautiful. One of his legs twitched, and it scared me, mostly because I had been standing there for the Gods knew how long, staring at him like a stalker.
I even had a hard time shutting the door to the cabin and leaving him there. It just seemed wrong for some reason.
“Jillian, you’re late. You’re never late. What’s the problem?” Alex, the lead on field work tapped his pen on his clipboard while shaking his head in disapproval.
I almost rolled my eyes. He knew better than to ask me a question that required anything but a yes or no answer. Everyone in this pack knew better than to even talk to me. The move to the dilapidated cabin came with the pseudo-shunning of the entire pack.
Never had found out exactly what crime I’d committed that day, just had to deal with the punishment in silence.
I gave him a tight shrug and moved on. It wasn’t like he could take my lateness out of my pay or anything. There was no pay. I worked for my place in the pack. And sometimes, I thought I worked my ass off just to be able to stay in this pack, since my spot in the hierarchy was the lowest of the low.
Didn’t matter. I’d enjoyed the solitude, until last night.
Now, more than anything, I wanted to plow through my work for the chance to get back to him. To Dean.
Crouching, I worked the rows of the fields, picking the weeds out and trying and failing to hide from the sun. It beat down on me until my clothes were drenched with sweat. After a while, the noise around me stopped, and I realized everyone else was packing it up for the day. Alex was shouting at some people about the good work they’d done but when I passed him, he turned, giving me his back instead of any kind of praise.
Don’t know what I expected, I hadn’t received an ounce of praise from anyone in this pack in my life.
Usually, I would take my time on my walk home, enjoying the sights and the sweet symphony of the animals around me, but this afternoon, I was in a hurry. I had to see him. The desire had throbbed in my chest throughout the day and fueled my steps, making them faster and faster the closer I got to my house.
He was in there. And even if it meant showing him my limited writing, I wanted to find out more about him.
What his last name was. Where he came from. What did he like to eat. Any of it. All of it. My wolf pushed me on, pressuring me to get there even faster. I listened to her, after all, she’d been my sole companion in this life so far. She kept me strong when I felt like falling. She was my rock when the whole world turned to sea.
I made a clamor of going into the cabin so that he would know someone was coming in and not freak out. But my heart fell right into my feet as I realized I was alone again.
He was gone. I could feel it like a hollowness in my bones. Like the marrow had been stripped from me, leaving me feeling like an empty blackness. Still, even though my senses had never lied to me, I rushed to the bedroom to find his pallet bed folded up and neatly placed on my bed. My bed was made, and as my bare feet padded on the brick floor, I realized someone had swept. The broom leaned against the corner of the room, not in its place, but I would keep it there from then on.
I collapsed into the nearest chair and sighed. Maybe I shouldn’t have left at all this morning. Maybe he would still be here.
Disappointment didn’t even begin to cover the ache in my chest.
Chapter Four
Dean
My hostess, Jillian, had prepared me some pancakes and left them near the fireplace to stay warm. There was no syrup or butter, but she also left a jar of berry jam. I smeared some on each hotcake then rolled it up and ate it, savoring the bright sweetness. I could have eaten more, but I had a feeling food was scarce for this woman who lived in the forest. And, grateful for her assistance, I had no intention of costing her any of her precious resources.
And I also had to push any thoughts I had of how beautiful she looked in the firelight out of my mind. She had such cute freckles and her eyes held both a history of pain and an innocence I’d never seen in any of the college girls I knew. My heart twisted just thinking of her. I needed to get my feet under me and leave before I got too attached.
I’d met some extraordinary women in my previous life...it was a previous life, wasn’t it? Everything had changed. But no one had affected me this strongly. And I could tell Jillian had enough going on in her life without taking on a man whose current life was a confusing flux.
Everything was upside down and inside out at this point, and I didn’t know what to do. Or...where I even was. Last I remembered, I’d been sitting in a psychology lecture at the small college I attended. I’d felt a little off, somehow, not in a way I could define, but as if my chair in the theater-style auditorium no longer fit me.
I thought I might have gotten up and gone out for fresh air, but that part of the memory was curiously fuzzy. With everything past that point even more confusing. A blend of colors and lights and pain. So much pain.
Rumors of shifters were common in town, but I always equated them with rumors of Bigfoot in the forest or vampires sleeping the days away in their basement coffins. Mermaids… Urban myths and fairy tales. But what had just happened to me made all of those things sound run-of-the-mill. I mean...I assumed that if there were any kind of out-of-the-ordinary beings floating around, they came to it naturally. From birth. Like...say you were born on a planet in Ursa Major. Of course you’d have two sets of wings and a single eye on the back of your head if you came from a different planet where that was the norm.
But me...an average guy raised by average middle-class parents in suburbia? No way could anything more unusual happen than say getting a thumb in a can of baked beans. The kid in my third-grade class who somehow always had all the gross scoop to share told us about that happening once, and as a child I had insisted on checking each container of beans before being willing to eat them. My parents deserved an award for tolerance.
So...a kid with a fear of severed thumbs in canned goods, who never went off the high dive in summer camp, was a pretty ordinary sort of fellow who took life carefully one step at a time. How the heck could I be something that I’d have said wasn’t real just...yesterday?
And what triggered it? Was there maybe some kind of recessive gene that hadn’t shown up in our family in generations and somehow came to me from both sides? We’d talked about such things in biology class. Not of the werewolf variety…
I moved toward the small window opposite the hearth and looked outside. The wintery landscape held no snow, but it was chilly outside. The thick glass, something that must be as old as the cabin itself—at least a century—gave everything a wobbly, out-of-focus appearance, so at first, I thought what bounced some branches of a nearby copse must be a deer or something, but when I traded locations, and opened the door a crack, I was less sure of the source of the motion.
The whisper of voices carried to me, two males I thought, although they were far enough away now to blend into the rustle of leaves and make me doubt what my ears were telling me. We were way out in the middle of the forest, so far as I could tell, and the only person I expected to see was the person who lived here. Although I didn’t really know where I was. At all. Or who might show up.
The werewolf idea was beginning to grow in my mind, and I was studying the trees, looking for anyone who might be out there. Anyone who might want...what? What if there were others like me and they were territorial? Wasn’t that something in the stories? The woman, girl who helped me was so attractive, even if she doesn’t speak. Surely someone would have claimed her as their own by now.
And that someone wouldn’t be happy about me staying over? Seemed logical. The longer I stared at the trees and brush, the more nervous I got. What if someone attacked me in wolf form? Could I respond in kind? When I saw no more signs of
anyone, if they ever had been there at all, I decided to try and see if I could change into a wolf again. At will.
I was standing in the yard, about to try, when it occurred to me that my clothing was borrowed, and while I wasn’t sure what happened to clothes when someone shifted, I certainly hadn’t had any on when I became human again last time.
So, I returned to the cabin and undressed then, blushing head to toe at the idea someone might come across me, I ran into the woods, hoping the trees would shield me from any unwelcome discovery. I closed my eyes tight and tried to find my “inner wolf.” If I’d done it once, I should be able to do it again. What had triggered that first change...and had anyone on campus seen me do it? If so, what had they thought? Everyone had a camera with them all the time, right? Their phone...so were there pictures or, even worse, video floating around campus of me becoming an animal? What would that look like?
I tried again and again. Wishing. Praying. Demanding a change. I might have even said “Abra cadabra” at one point, all to no avail, and by the time I recognized the futility of my efforts, the sun was getting low in the sky and I, in what was rapidly becoming a habit, had managed to wind up deep in the forest with zero idea of how to get back where I came from.
And I was naked.
And so cold!
The outside temperature was hovering somewhere above freeing but not too far above, and the miracle was more the fact I hadn’t recognized that sooner. I mean, I had earlier, but as I’d stumbled through the trees, I had been, if anything, on the warm side. But now I was shivering and if I didn’t find some kind of shelter before it got much later, I feared I’d be hypothermic before morning.
I didn’t see any other buildings at all or anything else, but I managed to dig out a shallow pit against a low hill and covered myself with dried leaves from nearby. Shivering, I fell asleep, too exhausted to stay awake any longer.
Chapter Five
Jillian
I got back the next morning.
Rarely was I away from my home overnight, and I especially hadn’t wanted to do it now, but I didn’t want to have to explain my reasoning. Dean, my guest and very confused new shifter, had not been invited onto our lands, and the alpha of this pack was a stickler for protocols. He might accept him, but he might not, and until Dean got his feet under him and learned to work with his wolf—a wolf he’d never known even existed within him—I hoped to keep our relationship under the radar.
Our relationship as pack member and guest. There was no more to it than that. I zipped up the hoodie I’d fished out of the trash behind one of the pack homes and shivered. I would wash it when I got home, but discards were the way I usually got my clothing, and it was too cold this morning for me to be picky. I hurried through the forest, the sun barely kissing the horizon and frost crunching under my feet.
I hoped Dean managed to find something to eat from my limited larder. At least there was a half loaf of bread, not too stale, and some soft cheese.
Would that be enough for him? And what must he think of my not returning last night? That maybe I’d abandoned him in the ratty cabin? I sped my steps, cursing the beta who made me sit with his girlfriend’s pups while he took her somewhere to screw her brains out. When I’d dared to object, in hand signals and headshakes, he’d pointed out I had nothing better to do but perhaps I’d rather join the two of them. A female like his, with pups whose parentage she couldn’t identify was rare and low in status, but nobody was as low as me. For reasons I still didn’t understand. Others had joined the pack since I arrived, but they all lived near the others in relatively comfortable homes and… No point in going over my situation again and again.
Also, no point in thinking my guest, Dean, would have any feelings for me beyond possible friendship and a little gratitude maybe. I vowed to help him adjust to his changed status. Maybe the alpha or another would have more knowledge about his late shifting. For the time being, I’d do what I could to get him ready to join the others, to give him the best chance of acceptance.
Not that I was an expert, but I sure knew how to be a pariah.
And I’d enjoy the company before he moved on.
I emerged into the clearing where my hovel stood but stopped when I realized no smoke came from the chimney. Silently cursing myself, I acknowledged that I should have shown him how to bank the coals at nightfall and bring the fire to life again in the morning. I had few comforts, but so far, nobody had told me I could not gather enough deadfall to keep a cheerful blaze in my hearth. If the fire had gone out, the place would be freezing cold.
I pushed the door open to the dim space. Sure enough, the hearth was cold and the chill worse than outside. Had I voice, I’d have called to announce my arrival, but a cursory glance assisted by the bit of dawning from outside revealed the pointlessness of such an endeavor.
Not only was nobody there, but the clothing I’d loaned him lay in a heap. Had he shifted and left? But to go where? I had the impression he didn’t even know where we were relative to his home. And he’d have to shift back to communicate with anyone. Naked?
In addition to the logic, something told me the possibility of his just stripping, shifting, and blithely leaving with no plan to return was not what happened. Of course not. He’d been so off-balance and barely understood he’d been a wolf. Would he have tried to become one again? But if not, why take off the clothing and leave it behind? I had few enough things to notice if anything else were missing, and nothing I owned was large enough for him besides the ones he’d been wearing. And left behind.
Had someone from the pack found him there and taken him away? Forced him to shift?
No, of course not. There would be signs from a forced shift. Blood primarily but likely broken furniture. And the clothes showed no damage at all.
The only explanation that made any sense was that he’d wanted to try and see if he could change again then been unable to return to two-legged. Then...what? Run off into the forest? My wolf rumbled deep within me, reminding me that she had skills I lacked in this form.
Shall we go find him, then?
Find mate.
Oh no. He isn’t our mate. We’ve just been alone too long. Let’s go rescue him. Again.
No response this time. I understood some wolves were downright chatty, but mine was a creature of few words. And I had no time to argue. Mate? Really? She probably just thought that because he stayed overnight. Or because we truly were lonely. Not just me. Stripping down to bare skin, I shook my head. How cruel was it for the wolf to be stuck with me? Living apart from all the others who would be company for her. I wasn’t even invited on the pack runs where the wolves mingled, and when they stampeded through the forest nearby, I could feel her pain. No, Dean wasn’t our mate, but maybe he would be our friend? I’d just continue to say that to myself until I believed it.
Before shifting, I grabbed the pack holding a T-shirt dress and added the pants I’d lent Dean. Once in my fur, I slipped the straps over my neck and rolled to put it in place. The design was a bit rough, since I’d done it myself, but sometimes you just wanted to get somewhere and be human again—and naked was not always a good look.
Dean had to be gone awhile for the fireplace to be so cold, assuming he hadn’t just sat around watching it get that way, and if in wolf form, he could have covered many miles. Had he gone too far, I’d never be able to find him. Nose to the ground, we snuffled our way past the tree line.
It’s been many hours. His wolf passed here before last night.
Can you find him?
Find mate.
And we were back to that. As we got deeper into the forest, we moved faster and faster. Between scent and broken branches, his trail was so obvious, I might have been able to follow it even in two-legged form but not with the speed my wolf could. And her determination would not let us stop even to drink water until we approached the edges of pack lands and found Dean stumbling along.
I got this, I told my wolf. This is one of those times I re
ally wish I could talk.
You talk. We talk.
Yes we do.
I waited a distance away, hidden from Dean by some bushes while I dropped my pack, shifted, and pulled the dress over my head. Dean was nearly blue with cold, but I hadn’t been able to bring more clothes. I needed to get him back home where he could warm up. Fortunately, his path had been more winding than straight, and we weren’t terribly far away from my place.
I stepped on a stick, letting its crack serve as a warning of my approach, and he jumped at the snap. It wasn’t as if I could call out.
“Jillian!” He faced me then, suddenly aware of his nudity, cupped both hands over his crotch. “I tried to shift, but I couldn’t.”
He’d be a lot warmer if he had. I could, of course, but that wouldn’t do him much good, or would it? Lifting a finger, in the universal wait-a-minute signal, I watched for acknowledgement.
“Yes?”
I undressed again, let the pack fall from my shoulder, and quickly donned my fur. Then I picked up the long T-shirt in my mouth and brought it to his feet. I followed with the pack holding the pants and waited while he put the clothing on. He was so much taller than me that what had been a dress, on him merely looked like a shirt that hung a bit long. It would be much more ideal for him to be able to shift, but getting him inside by a fire was more important, so we tossed our head and took a few steps toward home. I waited for him to catch up then led the way. I only hoped he hadn’t done himself any harm with his adventures. His skin was scratched and marked by branches and other prickly things, and his feet were probably in worse shape.
We’d deal with it when we were in a safer spot.
Halfway home, voices sounded nearby and I ducked into some brush, glad when he followed without asking why, and, once they became more distant, we started out again. I tried not to tell myself just how happy I was that Dean hadn’t disappeared. Because we were friends. And I cared about his well-being.
Rejected by Fate: A Mated in Silence Novel Page 2
