by KH LeMoyne
“Aye. I’d never enjoy your vagabond lifestyle. I’m fine never having to get off the train for my job.” Lewis gave a throaty laugh. “Meet all sorts of folk here too. However, you being young and single, must be tempted to travel.”
“Not so much,” Callum said. The truth was, he already indulged in jobs he loved. Clandestine jobs targeting emerging financial opportunities he turned into lucrative partnerships appealed to his sense of adventure.
“Then again, you must meet people too,” Lewis prodded. “Ever any intrigue in those telegraphs?”
“Very little. Dry banking notes, new baby notifications, and the occasional mail-order bride request.” He chuckled as Lewis’s eyes disappeared beneath his brows.
“You’re pulling my leg about the bride.”
“No. That telegram broke the monotony of a long day.” A white lie, but he met and interacted with influential people who’d changed his life and couldn’t disclose their secrets. Callum’s modest-paying telegraph job for the railway came with free passage along the rail line. But the work connected him with bankers, land barons, and kings of industry who wanted their transactions handled discreetly via telegraph. The silver lining—the alpha’s soldiers had even less of a fondness for trains and newfangled equipment than they did for humans. They stayed clear of the innovations and populated cities, letting him focus on his side business of providing private telegraph operator support to wealthy clients off the books.
Those same millionaire clients appreciated his skills and accuracy, but his ability to hold his tongue about their business rewarded him twofold. Free with details about how they achieved their success, they were generous with guidance on his ideas. Ideas guaranteed to put money in his secret funds and not in his alpha’s pocket. His fifty percent clan tithe, the blood tax demanded from every pledged shifter, came from his work in the railroad telegraph offices. A pittance, but paid from the job everyone saw him doing in public.
Lewis’s head jerked as he looked at a passenger a few rows back. “Aye, sir. I’ll be right with you.”
As the conductor made his way toward the back of the car, Callum focused his gaze out the window.
Bronze and red-wine forests whipped by in a kaleidoscope of colors. A random splash of emerald green winked from between the gaps in the surrounding mountains. Pines as vibrant and brilliant as his Gillian’s eyes. Ones he’d only glimpsed in his dreams for the past interminable weeks.
He played the coin several more flips and then pocketed it again.
Lewis strode back beside him as he shouted to the six occupants in the car. “Next stop, Williams Lake Station. Please wait until the train comes to a complete stop before disembarking. You have been riding the Pacific Great Eastern Railway, end of the line, Quesnel Station. For those disembarking, we hope you have enjoyed your trip.”
“Does anyone ever complain?” Callum asked as he rose.
“Never.” Lewis Newton’s mustache twitched as Callum stood up. “Exciting plans while you’re home?”
“People to check in on. How about you?”
“Craving slices of my Jessie’s apple pie something fierce.”
Right, just her pie. Callum eyed Lewis’s solid middle. It looked as if he didn’t miss much of his wife’s pie, but his tone implied he missed a sweetness far greater than any combination of sugar, fruit, and spice. He knew that longing, even though he couldn’t admit it as he kept Gillian a secret. “I envy you.”
“As well you should, lad.” Lewis moseyed on down the aisle as a high whistle cut through the final clacking of the wheels and the decking of the rail station came in sight.
Callum slammed on his hat, grabbed his satchel, and vaulted from his seat. Within seconds, he jumped free and onto the boarding planks of the station before the train stopped. His feet sprang as he sprinted toward the far end of the platform closest to the few buildings of the town. With a wave to the clerk in the office and the telegraph operator seated next to him, he hopped onto the rocky field between the station and the back of the stores along Main Street, the only paved street in town.
He revisited the seeds of the plan he’d set into place as he walked. Each one crystalized into numerous detailed plans in his eidetic memory, revolving around information he’d gathered from shifters fleeing the territory. They’d been easy to detect. Desperate people wrapped themselves in a cloak of agony, no matter how hard they tried to mask it. Given his own circumstances, he paid particular attention to those who had succeeded in escaping Karndottir. People on the run required cash and a way to survive.
He needed both as well. Because while every instinct had nagged him to take Gillian and run the day she’d hit puberty, he couldn’t in good conscience take her from her home without money and a new home to provide for her.
So he’d waited and watched. Of the few escapees he’d found and helped, all were men. Hardened individuals who’d lost their heart and entire future due to Karndottir’s callous decisions. No families took their lives into their own hands by illegally crossing the alpha’s territory—at least none had done so and lived. A single runner stood a chance evading and outsmarting the enforcers. More than one person created exponential problems. The Karndottir horror stories recounted hundreds who’d failed.
It didn’t matter. Callum had no choice. His plan needed to be foolproof.
Once he got Gillian away, he’d buy them passage on a ship headed for the Hawaiian Islands where Alpha Ping shared borders with Alpha Deacon Black. They wouldn’t be there long enough to register the interest of either alpha. He hoped. He’d then reverse their course toward the mainland on the first ship to San Francisco. Once they landed, they’d make their way toward the wine valley regions of Napa and property he planned to buy.
Simple. Precise. Dangerous. A plan almost complete.
Once they ran, they’d have a brief window of opportunity. Karndottir might be a bastard, but he was a smart, huge bastard. If he sensed them fleeing, he’d dog them until their dying days. A challenge Callum had to win since his life meant nothing if he lost her.
Callum’s strides faltered as sweet scents of early apples teased his nostrils from Mackin’s package store. He slowed and grabbed a Red Delicious off the top.
“Think fast, Higgins,” he called, and tossed a coin to the pre-teenage stock boy hauling baskets from the back stoop into the storage room.
The boy spun and snatched the coin out of midair and stuffed it into his britches pocket. “Thanks, Mr. Mann.”
Callum ducked around several delivery wagons and into the alleyway that abutted Deemer’s Hardware, then headed toward the main street beyond. At the end, apple halfway to his mouth, he froze.
Three burly men, wearing worsted wool shirts stretched across their barrel chests and canvas pants held up by suspenders, surrounded a petite woman with a large basket of produce. A rabbit shifter female.
One of them poked at her basket, flipping several potatoes out into the dirt. Another sidled in close, rubbing up behind her as he bent and sniffed at her neck. She smacked at first one and then another, not deterring either of them. The last shifter even went so far as to pull at the pale brown hair she wore in a tidy bun at the nape of her neck.
Callum hadn’t seen the men before, and though he wasn’t close enough to test their scent, he knew in his bones what they were. Wolves. Lawless, defiant, and empowered—part of Gauthier’s enforcer patrol.
Plenty of time, my ever-loving ass. Here he’d thought he was smart. All the while, the monsters were already sniffing through town canvassing for broodmares to haul off to their alpha. Fine. He could handle this.
He waited a second, torn between helping the rabbit shifter and leaving to seek out his own lady. Fortunately for the harassed woman, she was also married to the sheriff. A man certifiably one hundred percent human and two hundred percent no one for any man or beast to mess with. Ever.
All seven feet and two hundred eighty pounds of him stalked across the street from the grain-and-feed store.
Even without Callum’s keen shifter eyesight, he could see the throbbing vein in the sheriff’s temple. The men sniffing around his wife were about to regret they’d ever been born, much less considered harassing her.
The enforcers eyed the sheriff warily and with good reason. If the sheriff had been born a shifter, he’d be a rhinoceros. Tough, fast, and with a trigger finger that would put the legendary Jesse James to shame. What the idiot enforcers didn’t know—the sheriff’s wife, at last count, had delivered six daughters to her husband. Not a temptation for an alpha hell-bent on breeding a male heir, but the sheriff prized his wife along with each of his daughters and didn’t take kindly to men showing them an interest.
Callum backed up. His Gillian wouldn’t be as lucky if these men found her alone.
He hoofed it back down the alley in time to see a Deemer delivery wagon pulling away from the back doors of the lumber store. Hans Deemer hauled lumber for his father’s local yards and if his wagon was empty, then he was heading Callum’s way home.
Deemer slowed his horses at Callum’s call with a backward wave of his hand. Callum jumped onto the open flatbed with a shout of thanks and dropped onto his back. Any passerby would think he was staring at the passing clouds, not staying out of sight of the enforcers. Hans didn’t bother with words and neither did Callum. As a youth, he’d worked at the Deemer yard for several summers and then moved on to keeping the books and reconciling the accounts once old man Deemer realized he had a talent for numbers. He’d more than earned a short lift from Hans.
He needed his scent kept from the enforcers, not layered in a perfect trail to Gillian’s front door. If only the plodding horses would just pick up their pace. The urge to shift and bolt to get to her set his skin alight.
Mentally, he ticked off the path from her mother’s cabin to the hideout at the base of the cliffs. It should be easy. They’d practiced it a hundred times. He kept the hiding place stocked with food and supplies. Gillian should be safe there until the brain-drained wolf enforcers drew a blank on available females and moved on to the next town. Yet a plan didn’t stop questions from flooding his mind.
Why were they even here? Enforcers hadn’t shown up in this area since they’d captured Callum and forced him to give his alpha oath. The percentage of shifters here was low, not warranting surveillance.
Dread twisted his insides, his cat a wildfire of fury to get free, as he forced his thoughts to what he needed to do.
First, find Gillian. She kept a low profile in the community, not going into town, keeping herself to the Wallaces’, Manns’, or Doc Johnston’s properties. Few people even knew she lived here.
Patience. He had a plan. Gauthier’s scouts didn’t linger in the human towns long, especially with the Xatśũll Indian tribe lands nearby. The alpha and his mercenary group steered clear of the Indians’ sacred lands and magic. Gillian’s mama, Maisie, learned that secret when she’d fled to the Xatśũll lands after the murders. She’d bartered for a spell to keep Gillian’s cougar locked down, unable to break free for even her first shift, and clear from the alpha’s attention.
In theory, the alpha’s magic alerted him of new fertile females within his clan, but spells shielded Gillian. How, Callum didn’t know. He’d assumed their mating would dissolve the magic, so he’d held off, as much as it clawed at his gut not to claim her. No matter how powerful the spell, shifter mating held its own overriding magic. A magic offering both a blessing and a curse. He couldn’t take the chance with Gillian’s life.
Being too young to shift at the time of the spells, she should have escaped the alpha’s notice. So even if he found her now, as a fully mature female, she’d be labeled as a dormant shifter. It was common knowledge the alpha refused to risk any chance his offspring might be a dormant shifter. He didn’t acknowledge dormant shifters any more than he did shifter-human half-breeds in the clan. By Karndottir law, only transitioned shifters classified as privileged enough to take an oath to the alpha and give him blood.
“Privileged my ass,” Callum muttered.
A shifter male’s first turning signaled the alpha, making a blood oath to the alpha and annual tithing mandatory. For females, the outcomes were much harsher. Given Alpha Karndottir’s determination to produce male offspring, every new fertile female came under his scrutiny. He didn’t care whether they were his mate. He even considered mated females his personal livestock.
Callum levered himself up on one elbow to check the wagon’s progress. Another few miles to go, but the less of his scent he left as a trail for the enforcers, the less likelihood they could track him. Cold logic insisted he needed the extra time. No matter what, he wasn’t going to panic and lead them to Gillian.
A few minutes later as the wagon rounded a bend, Callum thumped the bed twice. He hopped off onto the side of the road and lifted a hand in thanks toward Hans. He ducked through the thick brush and sprinted along a narrow path, cutting through the dense pine and brush until he reached the fence marking the property line between his parents’ old property and the Wallace lands.
Even eighty yards away, he could make out Maisie’s open front door. Soap molds lined the benches outside. The fire pit she used to heat her oil and lye gave off a faint red glow, but the door to the shed she used for curing her soap remained open as if she’d just walked away.
He sniffed, catching the scents of lavender and rose on the breeze. From such a dull operation as manufacturing soap, Maisie created fragrant wonders. Callum subtly looked for markets for her soap on his trips once he’d found his private clients valued the handcrafted, aromatic gifts for their wives, daughters, and sisters.
He stalked across the distance with a rueful smile, knowing he wouldn’t find Gillian here. She’d take care of livestock and plow fields, but his sweetheart was an academic at heart. Biology, chemistry, medicine—she preferred a scalpel to the soap pots any day. Hand her a sewing needle and she’d take it to flesh before she’d think to pierce a piece of cloth. He’d have to hunt her down at Doc’s office on the bordering property.
Regretting he couldn’t just shift and clear the distance faster, he paced himself. If he shredded his clothes in a shift now, he’d be naked or in his cat form in daylight. A bad idea under normal circumstances, but based on the number of the alpha’s wolf guards in town, there might even be more he hadn’t seen. To invite a game of chase would be deadly, not to mention the risk of humans seeing him shift or racing around naked. Coolheaded thinking and staying in the shadows beat a battle any day.
As he passed the fire pit, Maisie appeared in the front door, shotgun raised and trained on him.
“Hands up where I can see them.”
“Maisie”—he halted at the frost in the woman’s eyes—”Mrs. Wallace, Gauthier’s men are in town. I’m here to hide Gillian.”
Her eyes narrowed with a fierce glint he’d never seen before, but she didn’t change her stance. He halted, puzzled. Even his cat whimpered and swirled inside him, confused. She had always treated him like one of her own.
“You’ve seen a great deal of my daughter lately.”
“Every chance I get.” No point in denying the truth.
“Lot of good it’ll do her with the alpha’s men hunting her down. And her in a family way. How could you do that to my girl? In my day, we mated first, and then we had children.”
Callum blinked and stopped breathing. His well-laid plans burst into flames as the violent protective instinct of his beast challenged him. Mate. Young. Protect. Clenching his jaw, he fought for control. “I thought the magic was shielding her until we’re officially mated.”
“Nope. Seems carrying your child destroyed any protection she had, boy.”
June 19th, 1914 - Triage included review of the bodies for any survivors. But the roof collapses, poisonous gas and subsequent suffocation, and mine fires dispelled much hope…
Gillian slid a finger down the page of Doc’s personal journal until she found the autopsy details for the various deaths.
/> She stretched back and squeezed the muscles stiff from sitting for so long in the wooden chair. “They must be here somewhere.”
With a shake of her head, she leaned forward and flipped open the human anatomy book sitting on the office table. Not finding what she wanted, she deftly flipped through a second tome for possible emergency treatments. “Tarnation. You’d think there’d be just one big book.”
After a quick glance around the table, she spied the small black binding poking from beneath the larger books.
“Finally.” The death report with a notation from the Alberta coroner.
“Physiological markers of death. Ah, here,” she muttered. “Gruesome. But if Doc could maintain his composure after witnessing the fatalities from the mine accident enough to write down his findings, I can manage to read it.”
She forced herself through the details. A tedious way to learn. However, following along with Doc’s experiences at least gave her a vicarious way to absorb material. He was open about his findings and speculations, and it wasn’t as if she was in a position to leave her home and attend school.
She eyed the office bookcase, its shelves overflowing with texts. Doc had been in his field for years and had the financial inheritance to afford books. She counted herself lucky Doc Johnston respected her potential enough to hire her as his assistant and allow her free access to his papers.
For her, formal training was a dream, nothing more. The alpha ruling the territory would track her to the ends of the earth if he found out she existed. She didn’t want to hide her talents, but if she pursued them in public, even for a good reason, he’d find out. Not to mention that schooling took money. There were roadblocks, but she refused to let them stop her from learning all she could.
