Of Wings and Wolves

by SM Reine

  When they finally parked in the garage, Nash was greeted by a different kind of mob—a half-dozen men in suits who desperately wanted his attention.

  “There are sixteen urgent messages waiting for your attention, three memos, and the university president trying to get a hold of you,” said one of the men, who Nash thought was probably his assistant. He didn’t pay much attention to these things.

  “I’ll address it tomorrow,” Nash said, striding for the elevators. The suited men paced him like particularly obnoxious ducklings.

  The lobby was still in the process of being converted into a gallery. Nash kept his eyes open for any sign of Leliel or her “friends,” but he saw nothing aside from human faces and a lot of paintings. The last few pieces were still being arranged.

  Nash caught one of his entourage by the sleeve. The young woman looked like she was going to hyperventilate just by having him glance at her.

  “Where’s the centerpiece?” he asked.

  “It’s veiled on the west wall, just like you ordered,” she said.

  He released her and strode across the lobby. Despite what he had told Abram, his painting had been given special placement away from the others. The wall had been redone to provide the most ideal backing for his piece.

  A woman rushed forward to unveil Abram’s painting.

  It was a triptych. The left panel featured Gwyneth Gresham, who Abram had captured perfectly—her inner fire, determination, strength. Thick braids fell over her shoulders and swirled around her hands, which cupped a silver animal skull with agate eyes. The right panel showed Summer with a wolf tangled between her legs and joy on her face.

  And in the center was the entire family. Summer, Abram, and Gwyneth. It was the largest piece of the three and depicted the family in exacting detail. They looked like a family of warriors, bound by blood and duty, and they were as beautiful and strong as they were frightening.

  Nash found himself staring at Abram’s portrayal of Summer. There was just as much light and wonder in her smile in the image as there was in reality. Everyone was certain to fall in love with Summer when they looked at it, just as he had.

  A jealous, angry part of him was tempted to have the painting covered for the rest of the event. But he stepped back and forced himself to take a deep breath instead.

  Let them all love her. She belonged to him.

  “A call, sir,” said his assistant, reappearing from the rushing crowd making final preparations.

  Nash glared. “Later, I said.”

  “But it’s from the diving team. They said you would speak with them.”

  Ah. Well, that was different.

  He took the phone. “Tell me when Summer Gresham arrives,” Nash said with his hand over the microphone, and his assistant nodded. He lifted the cell phone to his ear. “You’ve found it?”

  “I don’t know about ‘it,’ but we found a cave,” said a voice that Nash recognized as Edwin’s. “It’s flooded. We’re taking the pumps down, so we’ll know if it’s the one you’re looking for in a few hours. But you said you’d want to know immediately.”

  Nash had originally planned to immediately dive down and check out the cave himself as soon as they found it—pumping be damned—the event was going to start soon, and it was only getting so much attention because of his presence. If he left, nobody would see Abram’s painting.

  “Let me know when it’s dry.” He hung up.

  Escape could wait just a few more hours.

  “Holy mother of God,” Gran whispered. Summer agreed, but she couldn’t seem to find words to express her awe at the sight awaiting them outside Adamson Tower. All she could do was gape.

  Nash’s driver had brought them down to the gallery event after a short tour of Wildwood, which neither of them had visited before. But Summer immediately forgot everything she had seen when they tried to approach the gallery event.

  A red carpet had been rolled out on the expanse of sidewalk between the road and the front doors, and there were cameras everywhere. Summer wasn’t exactly shy, but the sight of all those people made her feel like she was going to throw up. Judging by Gran’s stare, she didn’t think much better of it, either.

  “Could you drop us off on the side?” Summer asked, leaning close to the window so that the driver could hear her.

  “You don’t want to go in the front door?”

  “Not really,” Gran said. “That many cameras give me a hankering for the company of my shotgun.”

  “I’ll find a bare stretch of curb. It might mean a little walking,” the driver said.

  Summer sat back, relieved. “That’s fine.”

  They had to go two blocks to find space to park, and Summer and Gran got out to walk to the back door of Adamson Tower. Without a limousine and a red carpet delivery, there was no way to distinguish them from the rest of the citizens of Wildwood. Nobody even looked at them approaching in their fancy clothes.

  Unfortunately, a little bit of snooping didn’t reveal a back door to the lobby. They were going to have to go through the front, whether they liked it or not.

  Summer hung back among the crowd, stretching up on her toes to see over all of the heads through the glass doors. There was a banner on the wall with a list of artists, and Abram’s name was at the top.

  The photographers stirred and shouted. Cameras clicked. Nash was walking across the lobby, and they were all trying to get a good shot of him. Just glimpsing his strong figure was enough to flush Summer with the memory of heat. She wanted to run through the doors and wrap herself around him, but she could just imagine the headlines the next morning.

  “Let’s sneak in with the artists,” Gran said.

  Summer was about to agree when the breeze picked up and a smell caught her nose. It wasn’t a human smell, nor was it Nash’s odor.

  It was a gibborim.

  “Go ahead without me,” Summer said. “I need to work up some courage.”

  “All right. I’ll see you inside in a few.” Gran slipped the animal skull underneath her shirt, adjusted her jacket, and stepped through the glass doors.

  Summer held her smile until her grandma was gone, and then she turned to face downtown Wildwood. She needed to change into her second skin and take advantage of her improved senses to find what was making that smell, but unlike back at MU, she didn’t know where the good hiding places were. In all of her twenty years, she hadn’t had the urge to visit the area—probably part of the idyll that kept everyone from asking any questions about why they could walk from Hazel Cove to Wildwood whether they headed north or south.

  But she definitely smelled a gibborim now. The nearest alleyway would have to do.

  Summer ducked under a photographer’s camera and slipped into the alley unseen. She whispered an apology to Nash as she kicked off her shoes, twisted her arms around to drop the zipper, and stripped naked in the alley. She folded the dress neatly and set it atop a clean, dry recycling bin.

  Letting out a long breath, she slipped into her second skin. She dropped onto four paws and shook out her fur.

  The instant that she had a wolf’s nose, she could tell that some of the gibborim’s stink was coming from inside the alley. More specifically, it came from one of the trash bags that had split open next to the recycling bin. Burying her nose in the garbage, she took a deep whuff of the odors.

  She dug deeper, enjoying the strange smells of the trash in pursuit of the angel’s stench. But she stopped enjoying herself the instant she discovered what was stinking.

  It was a piece of skin.

  Summer shied away, hackles rising. No wonder she had smelled a gibborim. Someone had left part of one in the trash. It explained why that odor was so familiar, too—it belonged to the same gibborim that Abram had shot dead.

  Once she had the smell in her nose, she couldn’t shake it. The odor left a burning trail out of the alley that Summer just couldn’t ignore.

  It would be easy to track that smell back to its origin.

  Ma
ybe she could even find Leliel.

  Slinking to the mouth of the alley, she peered around the edge of the building without leaving the shadows. People were still arriving to the party. Someone nearby checked his phone, and she saw that it was still a good twenty minutes until the event was due to start. Plenty of time.

  Summer snuffled around on the asphalt until she picked up the smell again, and then she launched herself on top of the building next to Adamson Tower, paws scrabbling at the bricks.

  The angel’s smell was close.

  She trotted across the roof and leaped to the next building, soaring through the air for an instant before she landed. It wasn’t quite as exhilarating as flying with Nash, but it was close.

  Summer took another sniff before dropping to street level again, trotting along the side of an antique store in the shadows where nobody would see her.

  The trail led out of town toward the forest.

  She hesitated on the sidewalk, glancing over her tail to the bright spire of Adamson Tower. Discovering a piece of gibborim skin in the trash outside the event was a little too convenient for her—especially when it led her to secluded wilderness. Summer wasn’t used to having mortal enemies, but she knew a trap when she smelled one. Better get reinforcements.

  Summer turned to head back, but there was someone standing in her way at the end of the block. It was a beautiful woman, lean and tall, wearing a filmy white dress and looking so glamorous that she wouldn’t have been out of place at the gallery event.

  She reeked of angels, and she didn’t look surprised to see a wolf loping along the sidewalk.

  “Hello, Summer,” Leliel said.

  Summer didn’t get a chance to run. Something hard struck her from behind, and she was unconscious before she hit the sidewalk.

  Nash waited with a glass of champagne even though he had no interest in drinking. He had thought that Summer might want to enjoy the drink when she arrived, yet the gallery had been open for an hour now, and there was no sign of her.

  “Where could she be?” Nash asked, pacing in front of the receptionist’s desk. He didn’t even notice the photographers’ flashbulbs anymore. He was just hours from escaping the Haven—they were welcome to have all the pictures of him that they wanted.

  “Oh, don’t worry so much,” Gwyneth said, plucking the champagne out of his fingers. “She’ll be here.”

  Nash balled his newly empty hand into a fist. “Perhaps she’s changed her mind about everything. Perhaps she’s…”

  “Run off?” Gwyneth filled in. She took a sip of the champagne and smacked her lips. “Trust me. She wouldn’t run even if she could. Like I told you—she’ll be here.”

  Whether it was true or not, there was something immensely reassuring about the confidence with which Gwyneth spoke. Nash managed to find a smile for her. “I forgot to mention that you look stunning,” he said. He wasn’t even lying. For a mortal, she looked fantastic.

  She patted his arm. “You’re cute.”

  Cute. Nash was fairly sure that he had been called almost every single adjective in his many long years—handsome, frightening, impressive—but never cute.

  She vanished into the crowd, probably to stare at Abram’s painting some more. The triptych was the talk of the event, even though Abram also hadn’t bothered to show up yet. Neither of the twins were apparently concerned about punctuality.

  Nash had received several inquiries about the cost of the piece, but without the artist present, it was impossible to say whether or not the painting was available for sale. It was one thing for Summer to let herself be distracted, but having one of the event’s headliners go missing succeeded in irritating him on a whole new level.

  He was hanging in the back corner near the triptych when Abram finally arrived.

  The young man cleaned up well, even if he had refused to wear the suit that Nash purchased for him. Instead, he dressed himself in a tuxedo that must have cost more money than all of the Gresham family’s savings. The lean lines accentuated his muscles and made him look like he could have been the billionaire owner of Adamson Industries, too. Women gaped at him as he passed.

  “So you decided to come after all,” Nash said, waving a hand at a waiter, who brought the champagne over immediately.

  Abram shook his head at the offer of a drink. “You said that you wouldn’t give my display any preferential treatment.”

  “I didn’t. There just weren’t enough paintings to fill this end of the gallery.”

  “Bull-fucking-shit,” Abram said.

  Nash let out a sigh. “Shall I apologize for treating the brother of the woman I love well? Because if—”

  Abram cut him off. “Don’t say that.”

  “What? That I’m in love with Summer?”

  “You know it’s not true. You’re an angel. You hate humans.”

  “You have some curious ideas about what angels think,” Nash said. “Interesting bias for someone who has only known humans before.”

  A woman wearing a sleek evening gown and an elegant chignon sidled up to them. To Nash’s surprise, she ignored him completely and put her hand on Abram’s arm instead. “I hear that you’re the artist of this gorgeous piece,” she said, gesturing toward the painting with her drink. “Do you do commissions?”

  “No,” he said curtly.

  “Let me know if you change your mind on that,” she said, tucking a business card in the pocket of his jacket before slinking away again. The sway of her hips made the dress swirl behind her.

  “This event could make you rich, Abram,” Nash said as the young man ripped the card out of his pocket, tore it into pieces, and flung it to the floor.

  “I don’t want to be rich. I’m an artist. I can’t paint on command.”

  “And you can’t buy food on dreams.”

  A man who had been standing nearby had apparently heard them speaking, because he faced them with a hungry glint in his eyes. “Did I hear that you’re the one that painted this triptych?” he asked. He had two chins and a round stomach, but the fine cut of his suit deemphasized his weight. “It’s gorgeous. I’d love to buy it for my private collection.”

  Another wave of jealousy surged through Nash. “It’s not for sale,” he said sharply.

  “What are you doing?” Abram asked when the potential buyer turned away, stung.

  “I’m protecting my interests.” All it took was a word, and there was a checkbook and pen in his hand. “How much for it? Any amount. I don’t care.”

  “There is no price you could pay me for this that would be enough. I know why you want it, and you can’t have it.”

  “Why?” Nash asked. “What have I ever done to you, beyond protecting you from enemy assaults and sheltering you in my home?”

  “You’ve lied to my sister. I told you that nobody fucks with my family.” Abram took a deep breath and composed himself. When he spoke again, it was much calmer than before. “I talked with Summer. She said that she knows you’ve been lying to her, and she doesn’t want anything to do with you.”

  Getting shot point-blank in the face by a shotgun couldn’t have shocked Nash more than those words. “What in the seven hells are you talking about?” Nash hissed, glancing around to make sure his assistants weren’t close enough to hear.

  “Summer has gone home,” Abram went on. “She’s not coming tonight. She doesn’t want anything to do with you. And if you’re smart, you’ll drop it. Okay?” He stormed away.

  Nash grabbed his assistant. “Get the car,” he said sharply. “Now.”

  seventeen

  Nash abandoned the limousine just outside of city limits. He hadn’t wanted to be spotted flying away from Wildwood, but the road to the Gresham house was long and winding, and he would be much faster taking to the skies.

  “But how will you get back?” his driver asked.

  “Just leave,” Nash said, removing his jacket and tossing it into the passenger’s seat. He paid all of his employees enough money that they couldn’t argu
e with him, so the limousine left.

  He waited to remove his shirt until the headlights faded into night. Then he opened his wings to the wind and took flight.

  Abram had said that Summer knew the truth. What truth? That Nash wanted to escape at any cost? That he cared about her in a way that he had never cared about anyone before? There had to have been some kind of misunderstanding—a mistake that he intended to clear up immediately.

  As he soared over the dark forest, he began to sense something amiss. Something that felt a lot like balam nearby.

  He flew faster.

  The Gresham cottage was harder to locate at night, and he had to spiral over the treetops for a half an hour before spotting the meadow. He dropped into the clearing outside the vine-covered building and pulled his wings tight against his back.

  All of the windows were dark. There was no sign that anyone had been at the cottage in days.

  He burst through the backdoor to the kitchen. “Summer!” he roared, voice shaking the entire house.

  The only response was a clatter of pans as a black cat leaped onto the counter and stumbled on the dishes. What had Summer called that feline? Sir Lumpy? He defied every stereotype that said cats should have been graceful, as well as the ones that said cats were beautiful creatures. His eyes seemed to bug out as he opened his mouth in a croaking meow.

  “Where is she?” he asked Sir Lumpy, reaching out a hand. The cat bumped into his fingers and purred. If the cat was still there, Summer couldn’t be far.

  A twig snapped in the night outside, and he spun, searching for the origin of the noise. The forest was silent again, but it was the kind of silence that preceded a storm. He could feel eyes on him.

  Someone was watching.

  “This is a trap,” he whispered to himself, and the words fell flat on the air. A strange energy surrounded him—a sensation he hadn’t experienced in a long time.

  He wasn’t surprised when the trio of balam emerged from the trees.

  They were deceptively cute and childlike, but Nash wasn’t distracted by their wide eyes and innocent features. He knew that sharp teeth were hidden within their mouths, as well as a hunger that was unique to their breed. A hunger for flesh, blood, war. Miserable creatures.