Once Upon a Wolf

by Rhys Ford

  “Yeah, one of those dogs is up there now with Gibson.” Zach felt odd lying to the woman, but he could hardly call the wolf Ellis, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to mention Gibson’s brother driving him into the lake, mostly because it was own damn fault for running. “He seemed gentle—the dog—well, Gibson too, but the dog was definitely well behaved. What I don’t understand is those cops that came by weren’t around back then, right? They would have been too young to have been involved.”

  “That one named Harrison isn’t from around here, but the one with the mustache is Pat Brown, the son of the sheriff Gregory threatened twenty years ago.” Martha sighed heavily. “Right after the Kellers left the mountain that summer, Sheriff Brown was killed in an animal attack on a car accident call a few miles down the road. Whatever got him was big, something vicious enough to rip out his throat and stomach, but it didn’t eat him. Something that strong and that aggressive usually is driven by hunger, but this time it just killed a man, then walked away.

  “Someone started the rumor that Gregory Keller had come back with one of his dogs to kill the sheriff, but there was no proof of it. ’Sides, it was too clean, too neat to be an animal attack. From what I heard, it was focused, savaged right at the throat.” She made a face, disgusted by a horrific memory. “See, animals are messy. They like to play with their victims, play with their food. Whatever—whoever—killed Sheriff Brown came knowing they were going to murder. And Pat Brown has been convinced the Kellers were a part of it ever since the cops picked his father’s cold body off of that bloody blacktopped road.”

  ZACH COULDN’T recall the last time he drove.

  Avoiding the driver’s seat of any vehicle hadn’t started off as something he did on purpose. In the beginning, it had been impossible, his limbs wrapped in casts and stitches keeping him from bending for long periods of time. Then after he healed, he’d developed a general reluctance to sit in the driver’s seat and an aversion that soon turned into a light phobia. He hadn’t even driven up to the inn after he bought it. His favorite aunt—Dawn, a bohemian wild child the family often didn’t acknowledge—appointed herself his driver then gently bullied him all the way up.

  “You have to climb back up on this horse soon, Z,” she’d said over the rattle of her VW bug cliché. “Don’t let your mind put you into a box you can’t get out of. If you’ve got to talk to somebody about it, do that, or maybe just get really stoned and find your center again. Either that or hire a hot chauffeur and bang the fuck out of him when he isn’t driving around.”

  She’d driven off in a plume of dust and patchouli, leaving him choking and alone in the middle of the driveway.

  The old bed-and-breakfast came with an SUV that had seen better days, but Martha’d assured him it was in tip-top shape, despite looking as if it had barely survived the Khitomer Massacre. More Frankenstein than car, the utilitarian vehicle was made up of a patchwork of different-colored fenders, quarter panels, and a hood painted with tiny dinosaur silhouettes. If he survived the trip up the mountain, the first thing Zach was going to do was get the damn thing painted.

  “I can’t believe Martha or Ruth uses this to go shopping,” he muttered, climbing into the torn-up and duct-taped driver’s seat. It creaked underneath him, and if pressed to answer, he would reluctantly admit to hearing definite signs of rodent infestation coming from the back. “Forget painting. I’m just going to set this thing on fire and buy a new one.”

  The inn’s SUV had a full tank of gas, and there was really only one road to maneuver, the same winding blacktopped ribbon Gibson drove down only a week ago. The bed-and-breakfast was too far from where the cabin’s road let out for Zach to see if the brothers had moved out, so he was truly depending upon Gibson’s promise to be there. The roar of the engine when he turned the key made Zach jump, and his stomach clenched in an odd rolling anticipation, a mingle of fear and excitement. He couldn’t decide if it stemmed from being afraid to drive or seeing Gibson Keller again. It was easier to focus on returning to the cabin than worrying about handling the SUV, especially after putting the car in drive and easing the vehicle onto the road.

  He didn’t remember the road being as uneven as it felt under the SUV’s tires or how the sun-dampening trees crowded the curved pavement. Patches of snow banked long stretches of the blacktop, and the forest’s canopy filtered off much of the sun with its thick bramble of branches, leaving a leopard dapple of light and shadows on the road. It was slow going, or at least Zach didn’t trust himself or the road enough to drive quickly. The SUV’s brakes grabbed at the wheels every time he tapped the pedal, their responsiveness surprisingly alarming instead of reassuring, but the large square-bodied vehicle handled well, negotiating the turns in the road with ease.

  It seemed to take forever to get up the mountain, and it wasn’t even that large of a mountain, more of a craggy hill thick with evergreens and other trees Zach couldn’t identify to save his life. He supposed he would eventually learn what he was looking at over time, but for right now everything was a sea of verdant hues, bark, and the occasional dark shape of an animal.

  Much like the giant black wolf that suddenly appeared in the road in front of him.

  “Goddamn it, Ellis,” Zach swore, slamming on the brakes. The SUV’s back tire skidded slightly, hitting a wet or icy patch on the road, and the panic in Zach’s belly turned to a bitter metallic taste on his tongue. Swallowing hard, Zach glared at the wolf through his windshield. Ellis appeared to be laughing at him, a wide toothy grin framing his lolling pink tongue. Rolling down the passenger window, Zach addressed the wolf, “It’s bad enough you tried to kill me once, did you have to go for a second time?”

  The wolf remained in the middle of the road for a few seconds, then ambled over to the passenger side of the SUV. Jumping up to hook his massive front paws on the open window’s frame, Ellis stuck his nose in, his enormous head filled the space. A froth of spit marbled his black muzzle and his ears twitched curiously as he reached in to paw at the inside door panel.

  “Really? You want a ride? This would be a lot easier if you spoke,” Zach grumbled, reaching over the cab to open the door. “I swear to God, you should be glad the cabin isn’t right around the next bend because I’d shave you so you looked like a poodle.”

  The threat was a weak one, and they both knew it, especially since Ellis probably had at least sixty pounds on Zach, regardless of which form he wore. The wolf nudged the door open, then jumped in, making the SUV dip. Ellis overwhelmed the space, sucking up all of the air with his presence, and Zach belatedly realized there was no way he was going to be able to reach past the wolf to close the passenger side door. Muttering to himself, Zach got out, went around to the other side, then tucked Ellis’s long tail into the car before closing the door.

  Inside, the wolf let out an audible snicker.

  “Sure, laugh it up now,” Zach said, mockingly baring his teeth at the enormous creature next to him. “We’ll see how sorry you are about teasing me once you get a load of the chocolate pudding cake I brought with me. If you’re lucky, maybe Gibson will let you lick the knife.”

  All his threat got was another snicker, and when he put the SUV into drive, the taint of a bean-fueled gas cloud filled the cab.

  “God, you’re such an asshole.” Zach gagged, rolling the driver’s side window down the rest of the way.

  One thing about Ellis’s presence—the best thing, really—was it meant Gibson hadn’t left. If his trepidation about driving up the mountain bothered him before, the anticipation of seeing Gibson again unnerved Zach to the point of a near breakdown. With the bad habit of talking to himself, Zach bit the side of his cheek to keep his words inside his mouth. His world had already been turned upside down with the discovery of a man—two men—with the ability to cloak themselves in a wolf’s body. He didn’t need to sabotage his growing attraction to Gibson by confessing everything in a senseless ramble in front of Ellis.

  “You know, if you guys were smaller, y
ou could so eavesdrop on any conversation you wanted to listen to.” Maneuvering the vehicle around a fallen tree, Zach surveyed the damage left by the storm. Or at least he thought it was damage left by the storm. “I never really understood how much I didn’t know until I moved up here. Most of my life was spent in the city, so coming out here is almost like being on another planet. I’m an alien here, you know? It’s like everyone speaks the same language but words mean different things. It’s not bad, just… not what I expected.

  “You sure as hell are not one I ever expected,” Zach remarked as he continued to drive. “I still can’t wrap my brain around it—around what you can do. I mean, I saw it plain as day, but I guess it changes my world. It makes me wonder what else is out there that I don’t know. Like, is the Loch Ness monster real? Are vampires? And how exactly does everything work? There’s physics involved, laws of nature we haven’t explored or examined. Well, maybe one of your kind has and we don’t know about it. The world doesn’t know about it.”

  Ellis remained silent, not that Zach was expecting him to reply, but a comforting woof would have gone far. Instead, he got a set of pricked-up ears, and then the cabin appeared on the rise.

  Gibson met them at the end of the drive, a worried look on his handsome face. He opened the car door to let Ellis out, stepping aside when the wolf rushed past him. His boots crunched through the small patches of snow Zach parked next to, and he was there waiting when Zach climbed out of the SUV.

  “Hey,” Gibson rumbled in a sexy, raspy drawl rich enough to intoxicate all of Zach’s senses. “I see you picked up a hitchhiker. Hope he didn’t give you any trouble.”

  “No trouble,” Zach said, then grimaced. “But whatever you’re feeding him, you’ve got to stop. He’s like a chemical weapon that goes off every time there’s a bump in the road.”

  “Yeah,” he replied, not quite hiding a smile. “He does it on purpose. I guess if you can’t talk, you gotta show your displeasure somehow, and I would rather he do that than chew up my shoes.”

  It wasn’t exactly the erotic welcome portrayed in romance novels, and it sure as hell wasn’t a slow-motion run toward each other on the beach, the wind blowing through their long hair while a hippie playing a pan flute warbled off in the distance, but when Gibson’s fingers brushed over the back of Zach’s hand, it awakened a part of him he didn’t know was asleep.

  His nose hurt a bit from the crisp air, and there was a hint of smokiness to every breath he took, an acrid taint probably fueled by a roaring fire inside the cabin. The woods around them were wet, a dank black-green decay moldering under the heavy snow-packed leaves, and somewhere in the distance, the rattle of arguing crows grew louder. Then the scatter of black-feathered birds swooped past the top of the tree line.

  Zach hadn’t seen the two-storied cabin’s exterior before Gibson had taken them down the hill, and he was struck by how large it appeared from the outside. Its roof was pitched high and steep, a common occurrence in the area and something Zach discovered was done to keep snow from bowing a house’s rafters. Still, the roofline was dressed with icy white scallops and the occasional dark blotch of old leaves. There seemed to be a lot of windows, an abundance of glass panes shuttered against the winter from inside, and the widest part of the cabin’s wrap-around deck jutted out over the small rise the structure rested on, giving the place a spectacular view of the lake and woods below.

  “You want to stay for dinner?” Gibson tilted his head and studied Zach with an expression he couldn’t decipher. “It’s nothing fancy. Rabbit stew actually, but I’ve also got a nice whiskey, and it’s strong enough to wipe away any bad taste left in your mouth after eating my cooking.”

  “I come up here with your brother on the seat next to me and we talk about rabbit stew? Anticlimactic, all things considered.” Zach frowned, wondering where he’d discovered the thread of fearlessness in himself during the drive up the hellish road. He needed something from Gibson, an intimacy of sorts, something to balance out the secrets and the confusion he found himself in. He needed a clarity, straight answers or at least a knowledge of where he stood and where they were going, even if they were just going to be friends. “I’m not sure where we go from here. I had to take a couple of days because it hurt to move, then I needed time to figure out what I wanted. From you. Hell, from me. And I was doing pretty good with it until Ellis showed up in the middle of the road, and suddenly, everything became very real.”

  “I thought we would start with the stew and then work our way through other things. I wasn’t sure when you would be finding your way back up here. Actually, I wasn’t sure you were ever coming back.” Gibson stepped closer, their hips almost brushing, and Zach resisted the urge to lean against the SUV, torn between wanting to boldly take a taste of Gibson’s mouth or having the other man pen him against the vehicle and kiss him breathless. “You made me promise to be here, but I realized after I dropped you off, you didn’t give me a promise you’d return. I’ve been making enough dinner for four people since I left you at the inn because I didn’t know when I’d see you again. So yeah, have a bit of dinner, something to drink, and maybe we can get around to talking about other things besides me being able to turn into a wolf.”

  Five

  THERE WAS a hell of a lot more to the cabin than Zach remembered. At the time he’d been overwhelmed, first with pain and then with Ellis shifting back and forth in front of him. He didn’t recall the kitchen, wrapped around one corner of the main floor, or the banks of bookcases lining most of the interior walls, their shelves filled with rows of double-stacked novels, spines worn from handling.

  A pair of short bookcases was set up against the back of the sectional, a line of pristine paperbacks assembled proudly between a pair of bookends made out of a split river stone. The shelves were packed with board games, their cardboard boxes nearly as worn as the heavily read-through library. The cabin’s furnishings ran to comfortable—a bit oversized, which made sense considering the breadth of the Keller boys’ frames—and other than a few scattered rag rugs on the gleaming wooden floor, the interior’s color palette seemed mostly made up of soft blues, creamy golds, and a few punches of hunter green.

  The dining room was exactly as he remembered it, a cluster of mismatched chairs pushed in around a circular wooden table that had seen better days. A laptop sat open on one end, its long cord plugged into a bendable pink power strip connected to an outlet on the kitchen’s free-floating island.

  “It looks bigger. The inside, I mean,” Zach commented, setting the chocolate pudding cake down on the counter. Gibson joined him, padding on now bare feet after shedding his boots by the front door. “Crap, I probably should’ve taken my sneakers off. Sorry.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that.” Gibson held the refrigerator open with his hip, then reached for the cake box to slide it in between a few bottles of hard cider. “Do whatever you feel comfortable with. I just hate to have things on my feet, but since I’m pretty fond of my toes, walking in the snow requires footwear. Also, if you do take off your shoes, be sure to put them in the closet. That way, Ellis can’t get to them.”

  “Is that normal?” It seemed odd to have a discussion about Gibson’s brother chewing up shoes, but Zach supposed he was going to have to embrace a different type of conversation if he planned to be around either of the Kellers. “I mean, you guys are still human or at least think that way, right? It’s not like—okay I have absolutely no social direction on what is offensive when talking about… I don’t even know what you like to be called as a group. This is a whole new field of landmines.”

  Thank God Gibson had a sense of humor, because while his warm laughter held no censure, Zach wasn’t sure he would have felt the same way if he’d been in Gibson’s place.

  “Usually we say shifter, but some of the family are old-school and they say werewolf. I’m not too fond of that one because, well, if you get into the whole werewolf, there wolf comedy routine. As for Ellis. That asshole has c
hewed on shoes since he was little kid,” he replied. “It’s something stupid that he’s always done, and no matter how much my father tried to beat it out of him, he couldn’t stop. It was just easier to put our shoes away. I guess there are some things that the human brain can’t deflect. I hate to admit it, but if you scratch behind my ear, I kinda have to thump my leg. And don’t get me started about belly rubs.”

  “I don’t think that’s a wolf thing. You rub my belly and I’ll agree to anything you want,” Zach admitted with a shrug. “Something about it makes me both crazy and warm inside.”

  “I’m going to have to keep that in mind,” Gibson said, edging closer to Zach’s side. It was intoxicating; the warm cabin air and Gibson’s nearness left him with tingles. “If you’re hungry, I can put the stew on to warm up. Or I could crack open some whiskey or a couple of those ciders and we can just sit and talk.”

  “I can wait on food. Talking sounds like a really good idea. Sitting sounds like an even better one.” Zach took a sniff, unable to help himself, and he was delighted at how comforting Gibson’s scent was to his frazzled nerves. “I’m the one shoving my way into your day. I would’ve called first, but apparently exchanging numbers was beyond me. Then again, my phone is on the bottom of the lake, and I just got a new one yesterday.”

  “Okay, then.” Gibson jerked his head toward the fridge. “Cider, plain iced tea, or water? Pick your poison.”

  His emotions were a mess, a tangle of doubt and bravado he couldn’t seem to sort out. A part of him wanted to be bold, his palms itching to cup Gibson’s face and steal a kiss, while a rational voice in his brain sang a cautionary tale. He was tired of being safe—of playing it safe—and the wildness of his situation challenged every single second of the life he’d led so far.