Gilead hated Cho for what he'd done to their pack. No one mourned his death, and they had little sympathy for the only three wolvers in the world who did. The Mate understood, and she imposed her will on the pack, but most never really grasped that Brad mourned the littermate and not the wolver Cho became. They'd been close as pups and young cubs, and Brad couldn't shake off the feeling that he was partly responsible for his brother's downfall.
"I keep going over it and over it in my mind; what I could have done, should have done to stop him, to make him see the train wreck that was coming," he'd told her once.
How many times had she held her big, strong wolver while he cried for his lost brother? Others saw Brad as a good guy, easy going, and worthy of his membership in the pack. What they didn't see was a young wolver who kept his emotions under tight control, who walked away from dares and insults for fear of losing that control, who tried to make up for what his brother had become. He kept his feelings for Cho to himself... except when he shared them with her.
"How are your parents doing?" she asked to steer him away from sad thoughts of the past.
"Okay, I guess. They sold up all their stuff and Boss bought a second hand travel trailer. He thought my mother might do better if she was on the road, like gypsies he said, like when they were young. It must have worked, because they're still travelling. They call every now and then, never from the same place. Mom sounds happy."
"Good, I'm glad. They deserve some happiness."
Brad's breathing shifted slightly as if he was about to respond. When he didn't, Olivia leaned back and looked up, just as Brad looked down with such a look of loss and longing that her wolf whimpered with the pain of it. Their eyes met, and Olivia's heels came off the ground as her body was drawn upward by the face she knew so well. Her hand came around his body to his chest, slid up the coarse cotton shirt, past the open collar and the vee of tee shirt it revealed. She smoothed her fingers over the rough stubble of beard on his cheek.
Brad pulled back as if he'd been burned. He turned away. "We need to get you home."
Mortified by her own behavior, Olivia tried and mostly succeeded in keeping her embarrassment from coloring her voice. "Is my car ready?"
"No. One of the belts was in shreds. I couldn't find a good one out in the yard. That's where I got the tires," he told her. His voice was hard. Gruff. "I'll stop in at Carmichael's tomorrow and pick one up. Go on, get in the truck. I'll give you a ride. It's a long walk back."
"Not that long. I can walk." Run, more likely, barefoot if necessary.
He looked down at her feet, disgusted. "Not in those stupid heels. It's a wonder you didn't break an ankle."
She'd thought the same thing, but she wasn't going to admit it. Not now. "I didn't hear you complaining about Hannah's 'stupid' heels."
He was walking away so she couldn't tell if his snort was one of laughter or derision. He threw her earlier words back at her. "Hannah Tilson? Really?"
Derision. Definitely derision.
"Just let me get my boots and I'll be fine. They're what I came for in the first place." Olivia made a move toward the pile of her things against the wall, but Brad was already there. He tossed the boots, one by one, over the roof of the car. She caught them, and he nodded.
"Put them on and I'll walk with you."
"You don't have to walk me home, Brad. I'm a big girl, and this is Gilead." She wasn't likely to be accosted and robbed.
"It is," he agreed, and kicked the stack of bald tires piled next to her things. "Where we still know how to treat our women." He paused and then muttered, "Even if they don't deserve it."
Olivia wasn't about to get into it over the tires again so she steered away with the first thing that came to mind. "You didn't seem to mind letting Hannah walk alone."
"Jeez, Liv, will you leave it alone. Hannah lives a quarter mile down the road. If she's teetered off into the ditch, we'll pick her up as we go by."
"Fine," she huffed, "but we'd better hurry up or she'll freeze to death in that skimpy outfit."
Olivia marched out the door, while Brad grabbed something off his desk and turned out the lights. If he insisted on walking her home, he'd need to catch up.
Chapter 5
He knew she couldn't do it. She never could. Livvy's silent treatment never lasted more than a minute or two. He used to count off the seconds aloud. She'd glare at him for the first thirty and then her lips would start to twitch. Now, he didn't count, but waited out the minutes.
He wasn't sure why he'd insisted he walk her home. Like she said, this was Gilead where crime was pretty much nonexistent. But it wasn't about crime, was it? This was Gilead, where walking a lone female home was the right thing to do. Yeah, that was it – the way it was done in the pack. It had nothing to do with Livvy Dawson.
"What's that thing in your hand?" she asked after the requisite number of minutes. She was still striding along as if this was a race.
Brad looked at the black box and clipped it to his waist. "An old pager. For some reason it works where a cell phone won't. I'm on call."
"So when did you start all this?" she asked.
"When you were in high school." Had she forgotten that, too?
"When I was in high school you had one very used tow truck. Like scary used, so used, Daddy thought I was safer on your motorcycle." And that said a lot. Her father hated that bike. "I'm talking about all this." She waved her hand at the buildings and rows of partially demolished cars.
"Right after..." You left me, he'd started to say, but changed it to, "While you were in college. I had some money saved and Stan was looking for full time work, so I invested in another rig, a better one. Bought a small snowplow, too. I got a couple of good contracts, invested in the flatbed, and it took off from there. We're out of range for most of the other companies, so I got what they didn't want."
That wasn't exactly true. In the beginning, many of his tows were stolen from other companies that were called to the scene, but could take over an hour to show up. Brad could be in and out before they even knew he was there.
Telling her when was easy. He didn't have to say 'When you left me.' The why would have been more difficult. He'd worked day and night, took calls seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, so when she came back, he could give her the life she deserved, a home of her own where they could raise their pups. She would be doing what she loved in a place that she loved. She would be happy. Or so he thought.
After she told him it was over, he put the money into the buildings. The business became his means of survival.
"So my going to college benefitted us both."
Did she really believe that? Should he tell her that the business didn't warm his bed at night? That the hours he spent at his desk or on the road didn't make up for the hours he'd lost with her? The business was all he had, and it was cold comfort.
He sacrificed truth for peace. "I guess it did."
Because she asked, he told her about his plans to organize the sale of used parts. He didn't tell her that every hour he worked was one he didn't have to spend thinking of her and all the things he might have said or done that could have stopped her from leaving him.
"I'm in hock up to my neck, but Jazz says you have to spend some to make some more. What about you?" he asked.
"Me? Oh, um, it was time for a change, I guess. Don't let the grass grow under your feet, you know? Onward and upward. I just needed a change. I have a few interviews set up for after the holidays. Until then, I'm just enjoying my time off."
Words that said nothing and no mention of the weasel. Brad got the feeling that he wasn't the only one avoiding the truth, but he had no right to question it.
After a while, she ran out of questions and they walked in silence. In spite of the cold, Livvy's pace slowed to a stroll. She'd always enjoyed going for long, leisurely walks on crisp and windless winter nights. It was a bittersweet reminder of the old days, before the business became a business and he didn't have time, back when
they had nowhere to go and no money to spend when they got there. They'd spent a lot of time back then just hanging out. Or making out.
Brad shoved that thought away.
When they reached the fork in the road, Livvy stopped and lifted her face to a sky clear of all but the twinkling stars and the waxing moon. The faint glow of it shimmered over her wispy curls and outlined her face with a halo of light.
"Can you feel it?" she whispered.
"Of course." No matter what its phase, a wolver could always feel the moon. "Everybody feels the moon."
Her curls fluttered as she shook her head. Her gaze slid to his face. Behind the shimmer of tears, her eyes filled with something he couldn't identify. "No, not the moon, the magic. They didn't, you know. They didn't feel the magic," she continued in the same sad, soft voice, as if speaking too loudly might break the spell. "They didn't believe in it. They laughed at my quaint country notions. They said it was superstition. There was no magic to it."
She didn't say who 'they' were, but it wasn't hard to figure out.
Brad had never believed in the magic, either, never heard of it, in fact, until he came to Gilead. He'd never heard of the power of the Alpha's mantle or seen its effect. He'd never felt the magic that flowed through his veins when he shifted to wolf, but Livvy didn't know that and never would.
From the time he was a pup, he was taught that the monthly shift was just an outlet for a wolver's violent nature. Releasing that aggression as wolf helped maintain their control as men. In human form, his father allowed nothing that would draw attention to the wolvers who lived in the hills across the road from Gilead.
"You walk on two legs, you do what you want, but I don't want to know about it, and you do it outside our boundaries. You bring the cops to my door, you'll be a feast for the forest." That was Boss's standard speech to newcomers. But for wolves, those rules didn't apply.
For the rogues he grew up with, going over the moon was simply an excuse to fight, hunt, and kill in another form. According to Boss Seaward, it satisfied a need.
Fighting was common. Death was sometimes the result, but no one from the outside would look for a man no one had reported missing, and no one could link the bones of a wolf to a man – if the bones were ever found. Nature had a way of cleaning up that kind of mess.
Hunting, as Boss Seaward saw it, was another expression of the wolvers brutal nature. He called it 'letting out the beast'. The deer kills were disorganized and vicious. The hunters gorged on the meat, fighting each other over the carcass. Little was left for the females or the young. His father and brother loved those hunts and called Brad a cowardly dog until he learned to fight for his share.
Brad still remembered the day he found out what his father meant by a feast for the forest, that the prey the rogues hunted was sometimes one of their own. He was still too young to shift, but Cho wasn't, and he couldn't wait to share the excitement of his own role in the hunt. He described the killing in gory detail and laughed at Brad's horrified reaction.
"Hey, live by the fang or die by it," his brother quoted their father.
"What if I say no, I won't do it?"
"You don't have a choice. Everybody participates, wussie boy, or else."
There were several of those hunts after Brad became an adult and before Cho tore the band apart. Brad helped run the wolvers to ground, and though he refused to participate in the kill, he did nothing to stop it. It was only his position as Boss Seaward's son that saved him from the consequences and Cho, short for Chosen, never let him forget it.
"Maybe they didn't know the magic was there," Brad said to Livvy, shutting away the memories that continued to plague him. He matched the softness of his voice to hers. He hated defending them, whoever they were, but from his own experience, he knew it was a possibility.
Livvy didn't speak. She was watching the moon again as if searching for something within it.
"Maybe they didn't understand," he whispered.
He never understood that there was another way to live as a wolver and hunt as a wolf until he found Gilead. The pack lived only a few miles away, but it was a world away from what he had known. Each group was aware of the other, but had no contact except in public places. Gilead's live-and-let-live attitude kept them from going to war with the rogues, and for some reason Brad could never understand, Boss made it clear that the peaceful pack across the highway was within his boundaries and therefore untouchable.
Curiosity drew Brad there as a cub. Running as a wolf gave him the chance to spy, and what he saw made him yearn for what they had and he never would. For them, shifting was a community affair, males and females together. They seemed to enjoy each other's company. There were occasional snaps and snarls, of course, but he never saw a bloody contest.
They hunted as all wolves do, but their kills were quick and clean. Smaller game was peaceably shared, eaten on the spot, or dropped at the feet of a special female. Larger game was dragged back to the village where it was shared with those too old or young to run.
He never saw them hunt their own.
Brad began to understand the difference between a rogue band and a real pack. His father ruled through brute force and fear. His mother was just his mother. She was exempt from much of the abuse only because she was under Boss's protection. Gilead's Alpha was old and frail, yet he was treated with respect. Brad didn't need to hear the words to know that the Alpha's Mate was loved. He saw it.
The rogue band's unity was based on safety in numbers and was tenuous at best. There was no loyalty. Its members took what they could get and left when they thought the getting would be better somewhere else. Gilead was a solid community bound together by something more, something intangible that Brad didn't understand, but desperately wanted. It was Livvy Dawson who showed him what that something was and it was magic.
"Maybe they never had someone show them how to find it," he whispered aloud.
Livvy's voice was barely a breath of air, and so low, even with his wolver hearing, he missed the words.
"Say again?"
She looked at him, and this time he recognized the look in her eyes for what it was - doubt.
"Maybe they're right," she whispered, sounding as if it broke her heart to say the words.
"They're wrong. Flat out wrong." He said it much louder than he meant or needed to.
The moon no longer called to him the way it used to. Its magic was fading. He no longer ran with abandon or played bump and tumble with his packmates. He couldn't blame it on age since wolvers much older than he was still enjoyed the game. He didn't chase rabbits for the fun of the chase any more, either. There was no fun in it without Livvy's yips of laughter as he dove and pounced and ran in circles. He'd already lost Livvy and the pleasure she brought to going over the moon. He couldn't lose the magic, too. It would be another proof that no matter how hard he tried, he would never fully deserve the miracle that was pack. He could never make up for what he had been and what he had done. He was rogue, born and bred, and there was nothing he could do to change that. He didn't want to believe it, but there it was.
"It's still there, Livvy. You lost track of it for a while, that's all. You'll find it again." He sounded almost as desperate as she did.
"What if I can't?"
That shocked him more than her losing the magic. Can't wasn't a word in Livvy Dawson's dictionary. Tell her 'You can't' and she'd go out of her way to prove that she could. The pint sized dynamo never doubted that she could do anything.
"You will," Brad told her with more confidence than he felt. He turned her around to face him and gripped her shoulders. "When was the last time you felt it?"
He could see her calculating days and months. "I don't know. I can't remember," she finally said, and then blinked up at him. "I hadn't thought much about it before." She shook her head as if clearing the cobwebs from her mind. "The moon is so much bigger and brighter here than in the city." Her laugh sounded false. "I know that isn't true, but it seems that way. I m
issed it, I suppose, and it caught my attention. It made me think. Stupid thoughts." She tried and failed to laugh again. "I'm tired is all. I'll be all right in the morning. You know how I am when I'm tired."
He did. He remembered it well. She got giddy when she was tired. She got what she called kissy-cuddly and he called horny. She did not get weepy and doubtful.
"You'll find the magic again, Livvy."
"Maybe," she admitted though he could tell she didn't believe it. "Old Miz Mary used to talk about something in the Bible, something about when I was a child, I spoke like a child, I understood like a child, I thought like a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things. Holds true for women, too, she'd say. That's what this is about, I imagine. I finally grew up, that's all. It's time to put away those childish things."
He was one of those childish things, too.
"I'm sorry I bothered you with it. It's silly, really," she went on, but she didn't sound convinced.
~*~
Edith, one of the elderly twins who lived in the rambling Victorian house on the road where the two former lovers were walking, just happened to be sitting in her chair by the window that just happened to have the curtain pulled back enough to just happen to see what was going on outside, so she just happened to see who was walking by.
"Edna, come quickly. Come see what I see," she called to her twin.
"I hope you're not being nosy, sister. That's not a habit to be encouraged."
"Oh, no, I'd never stoop to nosiness. I merely noticed something interesting and I'm curious. Dear Ernest always admired curiosity."
"He did, didn't he," Edith agreed. She sat in the chair opposite her sister's and looked through the window where her curtain just happened to be arranged the same way. "Oh my!" she cried delightedly and peered more closely. "These eyes aren't what they used to be, Edna," she complained. "Are they holding hands?"
"No, but they are walking together. That's interesting, isn't it? Encouraging, I'd call it."
Shifter's Magic (The Wolvers Book 8) Page 5
