Once Upon a Wolf

by Rhys Ford

  Daytime wasn’t for a few more hours, and even then, Gibson didn’t have any assurances that the sun would be able to break through the storm. The howling had picked up again, making Ellis’s ears twitch even in his sleep, and Gibson didn’t like the sound of the snow striking the cabin’s shuttered windows. The wolf had taken himself upstairs after a loud series of thundering rattles, and Gibson resigned himself to a bed full of black fur covering his sheets. If anything, the storm sounded as if it was angry it couldn’t reach them, striking the cabin in full fury. And while the gusts of wind made it difficult to hear at times, Zach’s whisper was clear enough.

  “Just want you to trust me. I just need someone to believe in me.” Zach slid down against the cushion, cradling his head against the back of the couch. “It looks like you’re doing this alone, with your brother. I’ve been that alone. It sucks.”

  “My brother nearly killed you,” Gibson pointed out, tucking a quilt around Zach’s torso. “I don’t know what he was thinking. Hell, I haven’t known what he’s been thinking for almost two years now. Moving away from here might be necessary. I just don’t know.”

  “Would you tell me if he’d bitten me?” Zach’s eyes went owlish, a bit of crazy creeping into his alarmed expression. “How long does it take before you know that… before you change into… what did you call yourself? Shifters?”

  He looked so serious, not scared but concerned. Rubbing at his side, Zach stared steadily at him, as if bracing himself against a fait accompli looming on the horizon. Chuckling to himself, Gibson sat on the edge of the cushion next to Zach, angling his body to face him. In the few times he’d been confronted with a human discovering his blood’s secret, he’d known them, each of them a good friend who’d stumbled upon a part of him he’d been told to keep in the shadows. Now he had to peel apart the armor he’d worn his entire life and expose the most tender parts of himself to a man he wanted but didn’t know.

  Instinct was so much a part of who he was, but nothing was preparing Gibson for what he had to do, for what he had to say. There was still fear in Zach’s scent, a thread of bright bitterness woven into the sweet masculine musk on his skin, and its presence made Gibson wary, even as Zach’s nearness stole his breath away and made it hard to think.

  “It doesn’t work like that.” Gibson chuckled despite the seriousness of the conversation. “You can’t catch this…. The wolf isn’t something I can pass on to you. You have to be born this way, born into a family that carries the bloodline. And not everyone changes. Sometimes it skips a person or even an entire generation. But you can’t get it from a bite or sharing blood. It happens at conception, and even then we are few and far between. Usually a shifter couple only has one kid, maybe two, and there’s no guarantee their child carries the shifter gene. So even if he had bitten you, the worst thing we would have to worry about would be infection.”

  “God.” Zach slurred a bit, and then his face went sharp and attentive. “I’ve got so many questions. I don’t even know where to start. I mean, do you know how many are out there? Is there, like, somewhere you all keep in touch?”

  “Well, the families know each other, but I suppose there could be some out there that we don’t know about. It’s not the easiest thing to bring up. Not like I can be riding on the subway and say to the guy next to me, Hey, by the way, I can turn into a wolf, how about you? Everyone I know… the families I know of… come from Ireland. I suppose there are other areas, other nationalities, that carry the shifting gene, but I don’t know what they are or even how to start looking for them.” Gibson shrugged. “We’ve mingled over the generations, so I know where it all began, but I don’t know where we are going to end up. I suppose at some point there will be even less of us, or maybe I am looking at it as if we are adding water to a shot of whiskey, diluting its strength, when in fact it doesn’t matter about the human element. The wolf will always surface somewhere.”

  “How many people know about you? All of you, I mean. How do you keep people from finding out and telling anyone?” Zach leaned forward, his breath smelling of tea, and Gibson bit back a longing to taste his lips. “It really is a secret people would kill to keep. If enough people said a man could change into a wolf, someone would get curious. And if I were you—if I were like you—and I know how people can be about something they don’t understand, I probably would want to murder anyone who threatened my family.”

  “The thing about murder is that the universe kind of hates it. Especially in this day and age, people notice when someone goes missing. I suppose it was easier back in the day, but now, especially in suburbia, people notice when the trash piles up or a mailbox begins to overflow. It’s harder to answer those questions than explain away something as simple as a very large dog.” He shot Zach a grin. “You’d be surprised how many Tibetan mastiff-husky hybrids my family brings over while visiting. I’m not saying that people haven’t been killed in the past, but it’s not feasible. That kind of thing follows a family; unexplained deaths can haunt a bloodline. Just ask the Borgias. It’s better to just keep things a secret than spend your life digging graves.”

  “I can see that,” Zach conceded. He tried to hide a yawn, but the connective tissues on his throat lengthened and his jaw shifted as he suppressed the instinctive motion. Still, his eyes were bright despite the sleep tugging at their edges. “How long has your brother been… like this? It looked like he was trying to change but couldn’t.”

  “Not necessarily couldn’t but won’t.” Ellis’s condition dominated Gibson’s life, and his frustration pressed against the walls of silence he’d been living in. As much as he wanted to confide in someone—anyone—Zach wasn’t a friend, and no matter how much Gibson wanted more, his own life was on hold until something broke with Ellis. “You should probably crash. Rest will do you good, since you’re probably going to hurt like hell in the morning. Well, more than you are now when your muscles realize what they’ve been through. You pretty much went through a car accident, then took the world’s worst ice bath. How about if I get you some ibuprofen and you try to get more sleep?”

  “Are you going to let me come back up here?” Zach asked sleepily. “Or are you going to drop me off at the inn tomorrow morning and the next time I come up here to look for you, you’ll be gone?”

  “I can’t make any promises, Zach.” God knew he wanted to but… he couldn’t.

  There were a lot of promises he would’ve loved to make to the sloe-eyed man falling asleep on his couch, but his life wasn’t his own. There would be no white picket fences, no Saturday morning strolls through farmers markets or rainy afternoons spent reading on a comfortable couch for him. Not now. Maybe not ever. Gibson hadn’t even imagined that kind of future until the moment he laid an unconscious Zach on the quilts his grandmother’d made, and his stomach tightened with the recognition of a kindred soul needing love as much as he did.

  “It must be hard, because I get the feeling it’s not that you’re trying to keep Ellis safe from someone like me, but instead you’re trying to keep him safe from himself.” The fire played with the angles of Zach’s face, rippling light and shadow over his cheekbones and across his full mouth. “You must be tired of doing this alone, Gibson.”

  “It’s the only way I know how to do this.” It was a quiet confession, but its power felt like a punch to Gibson’s already unsettled stomach. “Get some sleep, Zach, and we’ll talk in the morning.”

  “You’re asking me to promise I won’t say anything,” Zach reminded him. “I should get a promise in exchange.”

  “You sure you’re not a lawyer?” Gibson laughed under his breath. What Zach was asking was a risk Gibson didn’t know if he could take, but the plea in Zach’s voice held a neediness Gibson couldn’t explain away. The other man was desperate for a connection of some sort, and for some odd reason he felt as if Gibson would reach for him.

  “I don’t know why it’s important. I just feel like right now, here with you, I’m not alone anymore,” Zach
whispered, his voice trailing off. “I felt alone in a crowd of people, in a house full of my family and friends, but here in a cabin barely big enough to hold two humans and a wolf, I feel like you see me, you hear me, and I’m not just shouting in the darkness hoping I won’t disappear. So yeah, I need to have that promise, because I don’t want to lose this feeling. Even with as much as I hurt right now, I never felt this alive.”

  “Okay, then.” Gibson returned Zach’s whisper. “I promise. I will try to be here—to be there for you—whenever you come looking for me. I won’t just disappear—we won’t just disappear—and if I have to go away, for whatever reason, I’ll let you know where we’re going.”

  “That’s all I need,” he said, then winced. “Okay, that’s a lie. Because right now, I think I really need that ibuprofen a hell of a lot more than I need anything else.”

  Four

  IN THE days following Gibson dropping him off in front of the bed-and-breakfast, Zach’s life whirred past him in a complicated blur. The trip down the mountain was more of a covert mission than a homecoming. The storm had fallen back, but its furious touch left its mark. It was an eternity of fallen trees and snowbanks, an obstacle course Gibson navigated with his well-worn black Jeep while Zach clung nervously to the strap dangling from the vehicle’s roof. There’d been more than a few moments when the Jeep tilted dangerously, its tires churning on the uneven road until they found traction. They’d left Ellis behind in the cabin, and Zach worried at the decision nearly all the way down.

  “He’s exhausted,” Gibson assured him when Zach asked after the wolf. “Shifting takes a lot out of the body, and it’s hard enough to maintain your strength even with a bunch of sweets and proteins. Ellis pretty much shifted twice in the span of a few minutes, something I would never in my right mind do, but he did, and now he’s paying for it. He needs to sleep the night off. When I get back, I’ll see if I can maybe get some ice cream or something into him, well, that and bacon. The day he turns his nose up at bacon is the day I know he’s really sick. Let’s just worry about getting you home.”

  He’d been welcomed back to the inn in a flurry of excited words and tight hugs. There’d been a frown on Gibson’s face when they passed by a couple of sheriffs’ cars parked in the bed-and-breakfast’s lot, but it ghosted away, replaced by a placid, guarded expression. They didn’t talk much, and Zach wasn’t sure if he actually needed to hear anything from Gibson other than goodbye and hope to see you again. Zach got neither. Instead Gibson’s fingers feathered a light touch across Zach’s cheekbone, and his thumb brushed quickly over Zach’s lower lip. An instant later, Gibson drove off, leaving Zach with the distinct memory of regret and arousal in Gibson’s hooded eyes.

  A grim-faced sheriff and a pair of burly deputies greeted him at the door with a machine-gun barrage of questions and suspicious looks at the departing black Jeep. One of them mentioned Gibson’s name, a curl in his lip when asking if the man who’d carried Zach up the mountain had done him harm.

  “Not like he’s the type of guy to bash a man over the head, then bring him home,” Ruth Mahoney, the inn’s cook and bottle washer, snapped. She and her wife, Martha, a square-faced sturdy woman who spent most of her time tending the grounds, pushed the cops away from Zach, giving him room to breathe. “The Keller boys have been coming up here since they were kids. Their family has owned that land for more years than most people have been settled in the area, so don’t the two of you come around here and start talking shit about either one of them. The oldest Keller boy is a goddamn war hero, and the one that’s up there now, he’s always been good solid folk. If Mr. Thomas here says Gibson Keller did right by him, then that’s what happened.”

  With that, Ruth stuck a fork in the argument, and Zach spent the next few days being couriered to the doctor’s office, then shuttled back to the inn to spend the rest of the day sleeping and being force-fed hot soups. With his bruises fading and his limbs responding better when he tried to move, Zach grew squirrelly, chafing at every maternal effort Ruth threw his way. After a ten-minute argument about putting on thick socks over his two warm feet, Zach slipped off to find Martha.

  The women were in their midfifties, legacy employees from a time when the inn was a bustling business and tourists filled every room. Now larger hotels with fancy names and marble floors lured customers from the small, quirky bed-and-breakfasts dotted around the lake’s shores, and Ruth and Martha were left behind to maintain a man’s dying dream. They’d been making plans—or rather scrambling for a plan—when Zach purchased the inn and its surrounding property, sure that they would be turned out for younger, hipper staff. When Zach informed them he had no intention of letting go of two of the inn’s greatest treasures, it was as if the heavens parted and he’d been declared a messiah.

  Despite his deity status, Ruth still had no qualms in bossing him around, while Martha was a silent, stern-faced monolith of a woman Zach could hide behind.

  He found Martha puttering around in the shed, her overalls greasy and worn, stained with smears from her oily hands as she worked on fixing an ancient snowblower. She looked up when he came in, a placid study in grays and denim. Her close-cropped hair was more of a rooster’s comb than any particular style, and her frustration showed in how her salt-and-pepper bristle cut stuck up around her head. She nodded her chin toward the beat-up coffee maker she kept going throughout the day and grunted an affirmative when Zach asked if she wanted a refill.

  Settling on one of a pair of old Camaro car seats bolted down to a heavy block of wood, Zach took a long draw on his coffee, sighing contentedly at its sharp bitter taste. He waited until Martha laid down her tools, then picked up the mug he’d poured for her.

  “Ruth driving you crazy?” Martha’s voice was a scratchy drawl, a rasp reminiscent of unfiltered cigarettes and moonshine smuggled over county lines. She was the type of woman Zach’s mother considered beneath her, a hard-working flat-plains descendent who sought peace working with her hands and the land. Martha was someone his family wouldn’t see in a crowd or even give the time of day if asked, and Zach was grateful for every second Martha could spare him. “I love that woman, but she can drive somebody right out of their mind with her fussing. Sneeze once in front of her and she’ll have you wrapped up in blankets and drinking foul potions before you can even blink.”

  “Sometimes a man needs to suffer through a few things, especially if you can’t really do anything about your pains,” Zach agreed, rocking the seat back in its moorings. “I had to draw the line at her no-coffee rule. There is only so much tea a man can drink, and I reached that point two days ago.”

  “So you came down here looking for coffee?” Martha eyed him suspiciously. “Or was that just an excuse? You’ve got that I’m going to poke at a beehive look on your face.”

  “The coffee’s something I’m very grateful for,” he replied, saluting her with his mug. “And yeah, you’re right, I could’ve just made a pot of coffee up there, but I wanted to pick your brain a little bit.”

  Martha eased her thick body down on the chair next to him, hunching a little bit over her knees. “What’s on your mind? Because if I had to take a guess, I’d say you came back down off the mountain a changed man, and it wasn’t the tumble down into the lake that did it.”

  “No, you’re right,” Zach muttered, taking another sip, then making a face at the oily smear on his tongue. “You and Ruth have been around here for a long time, so you pretty much know everyone and everything in the area—”

  “You’ve got a couple questions about Gibson Keller,” she remarked. “Never thought he’d be your type. But then a lot of people would say the same thing about me and Ruth. I’m not going to gossip about the boy. Not that there’s anything to tell you. He came up here about a year and a half, maybe two years ago, with that big dog of his. His older brother, Ellis, built that place, so it was kind of a surprise to see Gibson moving in, but the Kellers usually do things their own way. That cabin is the first real struct
ure up there. Before that, they would spend their time up there in tents, even in the dead of winter. A couple of times I wondered if their father—Gregory—should be charged with child abuse, what with those boys having to survive a snowstorm with only canvas between them and the wind, but nobody else felt that way.”

  “They seem—I mean, Gibson seems pretty hardy,” Zach caught himself. “The cops didn’t seem like they were too fond of Gibson.”

  “It’s the dogs the Kellers breed. They’re monstrous, with jaws big enough to snap a man’s head like a watermelon in a vise. That kind of power makes a person nervous, especially if the animal is running loose on a property. But they bring one or two with them every time they go up the side of the mountain, and a couple of times, they’ve scared the shit out of hikers.” Martha shook her head. “People don’t pay attention to No Trespassing signs, and even though that’s the Keller property, the sheriff doesn’t want any tourist to get taken down like a deer during hunting season by a dog bigger than a pony.”

  “Has there been any trouble? With the dogs?”

  “Not with the boys but with their old man,” she said. “Back around maybe twenty years ago, maybe less, there was a group of girls who decided they were going to skinny dip on that side of the Keller property. I guess a couple of the dogs came down and drove the girls into deeper water. Or least that’s how they told it. I’ve my doubts. Snooty, you know? The kind of girl that likes to make trouble just so people feel sorry for her. Was a whole bunch of those kinds, and it’s easy enough to point the finger at a dog and say they scared you. I’ve seen those dogs on and off over the years, and not once have they done more than look in my direction before going on their way. But the sheriff had to investigate, and Gregory came out with a shotgun and some hot words. After that, we saw the Kellers less and less up until the oldest boy built his cabin.”