by Tasha Black
“Not. One. Step.” Ethan’s words to the wolf were clear and confident.
Bron shook himself, his black pelt sinuously echoing the movement.
“I know you understand me,” Ethan said nonchalantly.
Bron tilted his head to the side quizzically. Then the wolf appeared to shrug. Only when he lifted his shoulders, they kept on going, up and up until there was no wolf at all. A man stood before Ethan again.
They faced off for a moment, the angel and the devil.
“I’m not here to harm her,” Bron said at last.
“It seems Evangeline would disagree,” Ethan said immediately.
Bron’s nostrils widened, as if he were scenting Ethan. Then he chuckled.
“What are you, some kind of warlock?” Bron asked, nodding at the tool Ethan still held.
Ethan shook his head.
“Get out, and don’t come back,” he said, without moving.
“They shut it down, love,” Bron called to Evangeline. “I came to tell you. A man from Glacier City came in with a woman in the dead of night. It was a real pro job. The lady shut down the network somehow, opened all the cages. I didn’t stick around to find out the details, but it’s clear they were cleaning house.”
The words were coming too fast for the bear to process. She let go gracefully and allowed Evangeline to come to the surface.
“They shut it down?” she heard herself echo as her vision expanded and her sense of smell receded.
“You’re safe, love,” he said, allowing her a half smile. “They’re not following you anymore. They said Sharp was dead and Draven was no more - whatever that means.”
She didn’t feel her knees give out under her, she only noticed that the men were getting taller and the floor was getting closer.
Then Ethan’s arms were around her, easing her onto the sofa.
“I think you should go,” Ethan was telling Bron.
“N-no,” she managed. “Please, wait.”
Bron turned.
“Is it, was it…?” she trailed off. There was no way to properly ask the question. No decent way to ask if the baby she carried could be his.
He shook his head.
“They forced samples from many of us, but not all,” he said, sympathy clouding his features. “Reckon they didn’t have much interest in letting me swim in that particular gene pool.”
“Look, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ethan said. “But you’re upsetting her. It’s time for you to leave.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but Bron made a polite flourish.
“I understand completely,” he told Ethan. “Evangeline, my love, if you ever need my help, or if there’s anything at all that you want to talk about, here’s how to find me.”
He wrote something on the pad of paper on the table by the door.
“Wait,” Ethan said to him, starting to take off his shirt presumably to offer it to the naked stranger.
“Oh, no I’m good, man,” Bron said.
With one last sardonic smile, he melted into his wolf and clattered down the steps. Evangeline’s bear knew the instant he bounded out into the snow.
She also knew Bron was not the source of the bad feeling that had been dogging her for the last few days. There was no signal from the mark on her wrist, the way there had been outside when the streetlight went out.
No. Whatever that had been, it was still out there somewhere.
Waiting.
11
Ethan fell to his knees beside the sofa, still in shock over what he had just witnessed.
Evangeline had allowed her head to rest back on the cushions again. She looked exhausted, but not frightened. He tried to put his own concerns aside and focused on her.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said with a half smile that filled him with a sense of sweet relief.
“So you guys were… prisoners together?” he ventured, setting down the antique halligan he’d grabbed to use as a weapon long enough to grab a throw off the back of the sofa and wrap it around her naked form. He couldn’t explain why, but something about the old fireman’s tool gave him a sense of safety.
Evangeline nodded and sat up a little.
“What was that you were talking about at the end?” he asked.
“You were willing to fight a wild wolf for me,” she mused, ignoring the question.
“I would fight anything for you,” he said without hesitation.
She smiled, but the light was out of her eyes.
“We’ll see,” she said.
His heart ached, but he wouldn’t push her. No matter how much he longed to.
“I’ll get you some clothes,” he told her and dashed up the stairs before she could stop him.
He skipped Dot’s locker and went to the stack of new fire station sweats they had ordered for the big sale. He could write a check to the station later.
Ethan eyed the sizes, trying to figure out what would fit her. But all he could see was her fierce feminine form exploding into the furious creature with the chestnut pelt. It defied logic.
But he had seen it happen.
Outside the window, the snow swirled menacingly.
His hand went again to the carved stone bear in his pocket.
He’d had the feeling all day that something big was about to happen. Surely what he had just witnessed was the end of it.
Wasn’t it?
12
When the sound of Ethan’s footsteps disappeared, Evangeline launched herself off the sofa.
She couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t do that to him.
Wrapping the throw blanket around herself, she began to pace.
Her skin was crawling again. Her teeth ached with the desire to shift back into the bear.
What was happening to her?
Pain blossomed in her big toe and she looked down to see that she had stepped on a piece of glass from the shattered pictures.
She sat down to remove it from her foot.
One of the old black and white photos caught her eye.
A row of firefighters smiled up at her from their positions in front of what must have been a new truck. One of the men held a tool that looked like the one Ethan had used during the fight.
Absentmindedly, she lifted the picture out of the now-glassless antique frame, and gazed down at the proud faces. How long ago had it been taken?
She flipped over the picture to see if there was a date.
Something was scrawled on it but not a date.
2nd column, 3rd brick - A. C.
She flipped the picture over again. There was only one line of men, no columns. And what could it mean by third brick?
She looked at the note on the back once more.
A. C.
Arthur Cresson.
Cresson’s gold.
She turned the picture over quickly. The men were out on the street in front of the engine, which was parked in front of the open doors to the fire station.
Inside, two brick columns supported the vaulted ceiling of the garage between the walls.
Evangeline shivered as she considered the implications of what she had found.
A picture formed almost instantly in her head, a vision of what it would be like if she waited for Ethan to fall asleep tonight, snuck downstairs to chip that brick out of the column, found the gold, left in the night.
It was wrong.
But she had been wronged herself so very many times.
And besides, it wasn’t for her.
Didn’t the baby deserve security?
And this wouldn’t be security that depended on the kindness of Kate Harkness or anyone else. It would be all their own.
Ethan’s footsteps sounded on the stairs, and she slipped the photo under her blanket.
“Hey, what are you doing down there?” he asked.
“I wanted to clean up the mess I made,” she said.
He winced.
“This wasn’t your fault,”
he said through a clenched jaw. “Let me take care of it, take care of you.”
“I’m fine,” she said, casting her eyes down.
“Like hell you are.”
His voice was low, but the intensity had her searching his face again, taking another hit of those blue eyes.
“You can lie to the rest of the world, baby,” he whispered. “But not to me. You’re not fine, and you will let me in.”
“You don’t understand…” she began.
“Try me.”
She looked around, scrambling for time, just a moment or two to decide. To decide whether to trust this man who was a seemingly helpless human, but whose courage was larger than life.
“Evangeline, we’ve known each other since we were kids,” he reminded her, his voice gentler now.
She shifted her weight, turning to face him, and felt the photograph against her hip, under the blanket.
Shit.
Whatever she had been through and whatever she would have to face in the future, Evangeline wasn’t a thief. She wasn’t going to look this man in the eyes, a man who wanted to help her, who wanted to help everyone he’d ever met, and then turn around and try to take that gold. She never could have. Not really.
“Ethan,” she sighed. “I found something.” She slid the picture out from under the blanket and offered it to him.
He smiled and took it.
“Yeah, I’ve always liked that shot. That was the day they brought home the new engine. It’s in Tarker’s Hollow: A History.”
He must have read the same book in Mr. MacGregor’s history class. She guessed pretty much everyone had.
“Flip it over,” she said.
Ethan looked at her quizzically, then did as she said. His eyebrows went up and he studied the writing on the back.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“I’m not positive,” she said, “but I think that might be a secret that’s just a little bit more important than tomatoes.”
13
Ethan gazed down at the picture, then back up into the sparkling brown eyes of the girl before him.
Amazing.
But then, she had always been amazing.
In fact, so had the whole Harkness clan. Maybe that was why he was taking the revelation about their true nature so calmly. Part of him had always known there was more to them than met the eye. Finding out they were shifters didn’t really seem all that surprising.
Either that, or he was still in shock.
“There was a rumor about a clue in the pictures,” he said, shaking his head. “I never took it literally though.”
She shook her head too, a look of wonder in her eyes.
“How did you do it?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The Tarker’s Hollow Fire Department has been searching for the gold for a hundred years. You’ve been here a few hours, and you found it.”
“Well, I knocked it over,” she laughed, the sound as warm as a campfire in his ears. “How many of them ever tried turning into a giant bear?”
“No,” he told her slowly. “I think you were meant to find it. I think it was destiny.”
“Well, we don’t even know if this is it,” she reminded him.
“Would you like to find out?” he asked her.
“I think I would,” she agreed with a sunny smile.
He stood and offered her a hand.
She took it and he pulled her to her feet, handing her the sweats.
“Meet you down in the garage in five minutes?” he asked.
“It’s a date,” she agreed, then blushed deeply.
“It’s a date,” he repeated, smiling in spite of himself.
She dashed up the stairs to the bunk room to change and he grabbed the halligan and headed down to the garage.
He flipped on the lights and retrieved his bag of tools from the cubby near the door. He was about to head back to the columns in the rear of the garage, when he thought better of it. Evangeline had found the clue. They should look for the gold together.
He found himself pacing to work off the nervous energy.
Then he spotted the two big red and green containers by the cubby. Ed and Dot’s Christmas decorations.
On a whim, he grabbed both containers and carried them upstairs. Maybe he and Evangeline could do a little decorating to celebrate. She might like that.
He envisioned her cheeks, pink with pleasure over the pretty little tree. Then he thought of her smile from a little earlier, the feel of her sliding over him, and his cheeks flushed at the thought of what he’d still like to do with her.
“Ready,” she said brightly, appearing at the bottom of the stairs in her new sweats.
“Let’s do this,” he said, pushing his distracting thoughts aside.
She followed him back down the stairs to the garage.
He grabbed his tools, and then they headed to the rear corner, to the second column.
It looked perfectly normal - red bricks, cream-colored mortar, nothing unusual.
“Look,” Evangeline breathed, kneeling to look at the portion of the column on the engine side.
Sure enough, the mortar around one of the bricks was more gray than cream.
Ethan would have assumed that one of the trucks had dinged the column and it had been repaired at one time. Except that, it was too low to be banged by the high fenders of the giant engines.
He seated himself on the ground and opened his tool bag, pulling out a chisel and hammer.
“Aren’t you worried the column will come down?” Evangeline asked.
“No, removing one brick wouldn’t do that,” he reassured her. “Besides, this building was top of the line for its time. The bricks are cosmetic, there’s a steel beam inside.”
“Very cool,” she remarked. “It’s a good hiding place then.”
“I think so,” he said. “I’ve studied the blueprints, but I never would have thought of it.”
“You were looking for the gold before, huh?” she asked.
“Nah, I’m an engineer,” he told her. “I like blueprints.”
He pulled out two sets of goggles and handed her one.
“Is this really necessary?” she asked.
He nodded and slid his pair on.
She smiled and did the same.
Ethan tapped gently on the chisel, managing to get a bit of mortar out from between the brick and its neighbors.
He worked slowly and methodically, but the cement was quickly crumbling away. At last he could feel the brick loosen.
Evangeline clapped her hands together and leaned in.
Ethan set the hammer and chisel down, and reached for the halligan.
“What is that thing?” Evangeline asked.
“It’s called a halligan. It’s kind of a multi-purpose tool for firefighters.”
“It looks old,” she remarked.
“This one is,” he said. “It used to belong to Jose Cortez. After he died, his widow, Gloria, told me she wanted me to have it. I was honored. Jose never went on a call without it. It had been a gift from his wife, and Jose told all the young volunteers it brought him luck.”
“We could sure use some.”
Ethan nodded.
Something about the old metal halligan had always felt so good in his hands, he could almost believe there was some kind of magic in it.
The pry bar slipped easily behind the brick, which popped out like a baby tooth, leaving a cavernous gap behind it.
He looked to Evangeline, who sidled closer to him.
“Moment of truth.” He pulled a flashlight out of his bag. “Why don’t you do the honors?”
Evangeline grinned and grabbed the flashlight.
“Drum roll, please.”
He found himself holding his breath as she pushed the button.
In the darkness, something glimmered.
Ethan tried to reach his hand inside but the space was small.
“I’ll try,” Evangeline breathed.
“I’ve got it,” she smiled. “But we may have to remove another brick. It’s big.”
She pulled her hand out.
He chipped away at the brick beneath. This time it was easy to pull out.
Evangeline reached in and pulled out a thick gold bar. It glowed under the fluorescent lights of the garage.
They both sat back and looked at it.
“It’s heavy,” she said at last, handing it to Ethan.
It was. The weight in his hands was substantial. But all he could see was the faces of the other volunteers and their happiness when they knew they would have the funds they needed for the new roof.
Then Evangeline reached back into the cavity and pulled out another bar. And another.
“That’s all,” she said, smiling.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
“Christmas miracle, huh?” she asked, with a smile that almost looked sad.
“These are probably worth half a million dollars,” he said.
“Wow.”
“Each.”
“Holy shit.” Her hand went to her mouth. For a second, she was that shy little girl in Kate Harkness’s kitchen.
“Exactly,” he said with chuckle. “If we put this in trust, the fire company won’t just have a new roof. We’ll have a fund to help maintain the building and the trucks for… a long time.”
“That’s good,” Evangeline said. Her smile was warm and genuine. The sadness he’d seen there earlier was gone for now. Gone, but not forgotten.
“You’re a hero,” he exclaimed.
“Um, no, I broke a picture. I don’t think that gets me hero status,” she said, grinning in spite of herself.
“Come on,” he told her, handing her the bars and getting to his feet. “Let’s bring these upstairs and call the chief.”
14
Evangeline climbed the stairs back to the lounge.
Her heart was at peace now, and she wondered how she had ever considered keeping the gold for herself. Ethan would never have done such a thing. His eyes lit up with joy at the thought of all the good the gold would do for Tarker’s Hollow.
