by Lib Starling
Don’t think ahead so much, he told himself. You’ll only drive yourself crazy, trying to predict and control everything. That much he had learned from Katrina. She was wise in certain ways, though it galled Chase to admit that a witch could have greater insight than a shifter.
Maybe part of becoming wise is casting off what I’ve been taught. Maybe I need to try harder to move past Blackmeade, my family, Alpha House – all of it.
And Roxy?
Chase still cherished the brief memories of Roxy. They were sweet, even if their ending was bitter and cruel. He couldn’t move past her – he never would. He could more easily change the nature of his totem, or turn himself from a shifter to a witch.
Katrina hummed in her high, sweet voice, the sound rising over the sizzling of the cooking hash browns. Chase smiled, scanning the long frozen acres, the hills beyond with the suggestion of towns clinging to their sides. Never before had he known such peace, even with the turmoil of Roxy clouding his heart. Salt Lake and most of its suburbs lay behind them, its towns and parks and canyons fully explored. The area was too Mormon, the people unlikely to be interested in Katrina’s charms for sale, and she had declared it time to move on. Just one more town lay ahead, beyond the rural rest stop where they’d spent the night, and then the great expanses of wilderness and highway between here and Wyoming.
Katrina had been nervous about suggesting they head back toward Jackson Hole, but Chase felt ready. Blackmeade wouldn’t draw him back into its orbit; he was sure of that now. The only potential danger that waited in Jackson was Roxy. Only she had the power to make him give up his freedom and tie himself to one place.
But Chase didn’t even know if she was still in the town. Perhaps she, too, had fled, as Katrina had done long ago.
The Airstream rocked a little on its wheels as Katrina moved about inside.
“Chase,” she called through an open air vent. “Breakfast!”
“I’ll be right in.” He stretched his arms above his head, taking in another lungful of fresh mountain air. He felt ready for what the journey north might bring. He was strong enough to face it.
The impact of a sudden unseen force crumpled Chase back upon himself. He grunted, hunching with his arms gripped tight around his middle. As he struggled to catch his breath, fear like a black, oily fountain rose in his mind.
That felt like… it can’t be…
He held still, breathing carefully, his eyes flicking around the empty parking lot of the rest stop. There was no one nearby, nobody close save for Katrina, and she wouldn’t…
The impact came again, and incredulous, Chase felt a cold fist dig into the unseen flesh of his totem.
The wolf howled in pain, twisting away from the force that gripped it. His totem was yanked toward the surface, brutally battered and pulled.
Chase groaned, scrabbling with every particle of himself to retain control of the wolf. He staggered toward the steps of the camper, still hunched, his pulse pounding hot and fast in his ears.
Scarlett. It felt the same – the same clawed hand that had held him when he’d tried to reverse his shift after the fight with Alexander. He recognized the feel of her, the slow, sensual, casual amusement of her presence. But where was she?
“Chase?” Katrina called again from the camper.
He tried to respond, but the only sound he could make was a pained rasping from deep in his throat, and something very close to a howl.
The Airstream’s side door opened; Katrina’s mouth fell open as she watched Chase struggling against the camper’s silvery side. She dropped her skillet of hash browns on the pavement with a reverberating clang.
“What’s wrong?”
“I…” Chase doubled over again, clawing furiously at his wolf. The creature inside contorted with rage and pain, and then, with a howl of defeat, his totem was wrenched from his control.
The white light flashed. Chase tried to reverse the shift as quickly as it happened, but it was no use. His stay was gone, and Scarlett had full control.
“Oh!” Katrina cried. She rushed toward him, dropped to her knees and took his furred face in her hands.
Chase growled, trying to warn her away, unsure what Scarlett might do with him.
“Shift back,” she shouted. “Chase, you have to!”
The gray wolf agonized, whining and twitching its fur, but Chase could not return to the surface. He snuffled helplessly, pressing his great head against Katrina’s stomach, and she trembled as she embraced him.
“Come on,” she pleaded. “Into the camper.”
Chase shook his head.
“You have to, Chase. Let me help you.”
You can’t help me, he thought desperately, knowing she could not hear him. Bleak panic welled up inside him. His stay was gone. Scarlett was in control.
He tried to force himself to think calmly, to piece together what this meant. Scarlett was still out there, as he’d known she would be. She was still targeting him, still bent on her mad vengeance.
And she knew where to find him.
Chase drew back and gazed at Katrina. Her gray-blue eyes brimmed with tears as she stared into his own, struggling to find some way to help.
I have to go, he tried to tell her. He hoped she would see the meaning in his wolf’s face. Scarlett knows where to find me, and that means you’re in danger, too.
“Please,” Katrina said again. “Let me drive you somewhere… back to Blackmeade. They can help you.”
Chase drew away from her. There was help at Blackmeade – that was true. But he wouldn’t endanger Katrina by traveling with her.
He stepped toward the frozen acres, pointed his muzzle to the north. Then he stared back at his friend, his former lover, hoping she understood.
“Don’t,” Katrina begged him. “Let me help you, Chase. There are spells I can try. Let me…”
He bounded off into the snow. It cracked beneath his pads, but the thick fur between his toes spread like snowshoes and bore him up, so that he skimmed over the surface of the fields as quick and light as a bird across the sky.
Northward – northward for days. And when he could, he would stay in sight of the highway, watching for Katrina, hoping she followed. But he must go north, back to Blackmeade. Help was there, and if fate was kind to him, if luck was on his side, he could warn the brotherhood before the same fate befell them, too.
The brotherhood, and Roxy.
“Chase!” Katrina’s voice was high and thin, distant, fading far behind him as he ran.
Chase paused at the crest of a small hill and turned back to see her. She was a tiny dark form beside the silver slash of the Airstream. If she was as wise as he thought, Katrina would follow him.
He threw back his head and howled, a song of sorrow and farewell, a cry of challenge to the witch who tormented him. Then he turned and ran toward the rising hills, the snow flying behind him in a spray of lonesome, ice-cold dust.
Part 5
.1.
T he snow was thick on the crest of the ridge. The late afternoon sun cast its hue over the slope, the crystals of ice in the snowpack dazzling Chase with a coruscation of reds, oranges, and golden-yellows. Sagebrush and low-growing juniper bowed under the weight of winter, their jagged forms reduced to pale, rounded humps by their late January shrouds. Between their shapes, in the open patches of snow, a variety of animal tracks crisscrossed the ridge. Chase noted the large, wide pads of various canines, the delicate, split-toed points of elk and deer, and between them, almost lost amid the larger prints, the small, bounding tracks of rabbit and weasel.
His wolfish tongue extended, licking his muzzle in a relieved grin. When he inhaled, he could still detect the faint traces of some of his brothers from Alpha Delta Phi. Many of the tracks looked old, some of them half-filled by the hard crusts of month-old snows. The brothers had been passing this way all winter long. Simply out running, he wondered—exercising their totemic forms? Or was there a purpose to these patrols? He sniffed again, and thought
he could smell the mild traces of determination, and something more concerning—worry. Fear.
Chase shook his ruff abruptly. Fear shouldn’t surprise him. Didn’t he know better than anybody else that the brothers of Alpha House had plenty to fear? He was close to the campus, close to the frat house where his friends were waiting—that was all that mattered now. He’d nearly made it back to Blackmeade University and the assistance of his brothers.
He only hoped he would find the help he needed at the fraternity, and not the chaos he’d left when he fled into his new life of freedom.
Chase set off down the slope, heading west. The winter sun was low and pale, sinking rapidly behind the Teton peaks. He squinted his eyes against its fitful glare, the light flashing through the branches of evergreens and rebounding off the snow.
As he ran, he reached toward his heart and prodded tentatively at his human spirit—the man who huddled within him, still stunned and disbelieving. He had run for three days, pushed on relentlessly by anger and fear, and all the while he had poked at his human spirit, terrified it would recede into blackness before he could find some way to preserve himself.
Now and then over the course of his long journey, when he was still relatively close to the highways, Chase would pause on some rocky vantage overlooking the road until he caught sight of Katrina’s distant camper trundling up a hillside. Then he’d turn and continue on his journey, hoping with bleak desperation that if the brothers of Alpha House didn’t find the answer to his predicament, Katrina would. It was a thin, fragile hope, but Chase clung to it with fervor. Sometimes he felt as if it that slim hope was the only thing keeping his human spirit sane.
By the morning of the second day, Chase had been obliged to veer from the roadways and strike out through the wilderness. The shortest way for a lone wolf to reach Blackmeade was by running in a straight line. Katrina would reach the campus in her own time, but for Chase, every passing hour might mean the difference between retaining his grip on humanity and falling irrevocably into his lupine essence. With one final look at the silver Airstream winding its way slowly up a two-lane mountain pass, Chase had put the road at his back and trotted determinedly through the forest, alone.
The loneliness was the worst part of his journey—far worse than his uncertainty about his fate. God alone knew whether the brothers and Katrina together would have the resources to break Scarlett’s hold and return Chase to his unshifted self. That was out of his hands. But he longed for the comfort of companionship so fiercely that he could have howled with the ache of it.
Cruelly, his heart invented that companionship for him as he devoured the miles of wilderness with his tireless lope. Again and again he saw Roxy’s face, heard her voice, felt the press of her warm body against his, and tasted the sweetness of her kiss. The pain of that vision—knowing that he’d lost her for good, when she was all he wanted in the world; knowing he would never have her again—was a burning worse than the chafe of snow against his paw-pads, a feeling more desolate than the vast emptiness of the forest.
But as the hours wore on and his wolf’s body grew weary with the monotony of running, the torment of Roxy’s lost sweetness changed into a sensation sharper and more brutal by far. Again and again he saw the disdainful way she’d stared down at him from the Alpha House stairway on the night of his confrontation with Alexander. Again and again he heard her fierce, insistent words. They echoed in his head, bouncing with the rhythm of his gait. You should all be ashamed of yourselves. I never want to see any of you again.
Please, Chase begged the specter of her memory. Forgive me.
He headed down the western slope of the ridge, head slung low with weariness and a nagging, gnawing worry. Now that Blackmeade was close, his greatest fear was not that his human spirit would be lost to his wolf totem, but that he would never be able to speak again, could never explain what had happened to Roxy—could never apologize for having wronged her.
The sun was long gone, vanished behind the jagged line of the mountains, by the time Chase reached Blackmeade Village. He stood on the last rise of a hillside, blanketed in sage and snow, gazing down on the few streets of the village and the impressive Gothic towers of the University beyond. The sight pulled at his twin spirits—human and wolf—filling him with a strange, mingled agony of love and regret.
Chase sniffed the air. The scents of the campus and Greek Row, with its old Victorian houses and yards strewn with the litter of young college men, struck him like a blow. He could smell it all so clearly—the dusty tomes in the distant library, the dry, aged whiff of old stonework from the University’s walls, the distinctive odors of the frat houses—boozy, male, energetic—and over all the rest, the homey, welcoming scent of Alpha House.
He exhaled with a sigh. Blackmeade and Alpha House had been his entire world—his life—until he’d met Roxy. The familiarity of his surroundings stabbed deep into his heart, stirring the hidden, crouching spirit of his human form.
There’s nothing to do but go on, he told himself firmly. Go back to Alpha House, and hope somebody there can help.
Greek Row lay like a precise map below him. He set his sights on the grand façade of Alpha House, violet-gray in the gathering dusk, and set out across the broad, icy slope.
Is Alexander still in charge? he wondered. Chase couldn’t decide whether he’d rather find the stoic, pale young man still playing the crucial role of alpha to his frat brothers—guiding them—controlling them, a part of Chase’s mind insisted, rankling and resistant.
Chase had beaten Alexander squarely in their fight—a confrontation that had been a long time coming. The role of alpha should be Chase’s now by rights, yet he had fled from the frat altogether. Had he left his brothers rudderless, just to suit his own selfish desires? A pang of guilt assailed him as he trotted through the night.
Surely, he thought, Alexander had stepped back into the role of alpha. He was such a natural leader. Or if Alexander’s shame over being defeated was too great, somebody else—Logan, maybe.
But Chase shook his head. He knew in his heart that there was no one else who could guide the frat as effectively as Alexander or Chase himself. And he’d overthrown his pale-wolf rival—for Roxy’s sake, of course, but still…the damage to the fraternity’s critical order had been done. He’d left his brothers without a leader. He had no one but himself to blame.
A faint crackling interrupted his dark thoughts. Chase stumbled to a halt between two snow-covered clumps of sagebrush. He gazed about him, suddenly tense, and was reminded with a rush of anger that Scarlett was still out there…somewhere. He growled.
Out of the deep twilight shadows, a large, leggy form stepped delicately across the snow. Chase’s first instinct—wolfish and wild—was to pursue. He had taken only small creatures in his three days of travel; squirrels, voles, and chipmunks. They were barely a mouthful each, and he was ravenous. Then the gathering starlight illuminated the creature’s face, and the dark, soulful eyes arrested his predatory instincts. He knew this animal.
Darien, Chase said with his thoughts.
The elk came forward more eagerly. Chase! So it is you. I thought I recognized your wolf, but I couldn’t be sure in the dusk… The massive bull elk tilted his head at a quizzical angle. You look hungry.
I’ve been running for three days, Chase said. I could really go for a haunch of venison right now.
Very funny.
Chase trotted forward, his tail lifting and wagging for the first time in days. Darien ducked his head, blowing gently against Chase’s fur, and Chase butted his wolf’s head against Darien’s high, slender knee in greeting.
It’s good to see you again, Chase told him.
You, too. You have no idea how good it is to see you. We’ve all been worried sick about you.
I was all right. I went down to Salt Lake and got a job. I was doing okay, living on my own, until… Chase trailed off.
After a moment, Darien prompted, Until what?
Sudden misgiving
seized Chase. He’d come all this way to seek help for his predicament, yet now he found he couldn’t speak of it. He changed the subject. How are things at Alpha House? I mean…Alexander…
The elk sighed. If I knew, I’d tell you.
Chase peered up at Darien in the soft, silver glow of starlight. What are you talking about?
I don’t live at the frat house anymore, Darien admitted. One large velvet ear twitched, and the elk regarded Chase with careful consideration before he finally said, I’ve moved into town…with Brooke and Roxy.
The mention of her name was like a spear through Chase’s ribs. He nodded slowly. Is she…?
She’s all right, Chase, Darien assured him. She’s learning fast. She’s a capable shifter now. She even… Darien paused, tossing his huge, branching antlers in uncertainty. I don’t want to alarm you, but she reversed a forced shift not too long ago.
Chase’s spine tingled and his hide twitched uncomfortably. He could feel his gray hackles lifting. A forced shift?
We suspect Scarlett.
No shit, Chase said wryly.
Darien went on, Brooke even thought she spotted Scarlett on the streets of Jackson Hole. She’s been trying to track her surreptitiously—to find out where she’s hiding. If that witch is back in Jackson, so close to all of us…well, it’s why I’m here, and not at home with the girls. It’s my turn for the patrol. We keep watch around Blackmeade, day and night, and nobody leaves the campus anymore unless it’s an emergency.
The gray wolf gave a snort of bitter amusement. It doesn’t matter whether Scarlett’s in town or not. She can still reach any of us she wants to target.
The elk gave Chase a long, searching stare, then said reluctantly, What do you mean?
Scarlett already got to me. Chase’s golden eyes were pained in the starlight. She force-shifted me when I was just outside of Salt Lake. She has my stay; there was nothing I could do to stop it. A cold breeze stirred the hillside, and Chase shivered. I’m stuck, Darien. I can’t return to my human form. I’m completely at Scarlett’s mercy.
