Mountain Echoes wp-8

by C. E. Murphy

  Some of the color faded from his face and an acknowledgment pulled at one corner of his mouth. I didn’t know if he needed a way out, but I was more than happy to give him one. If there had been wolfy hijinks with him and Tia, I did not want to know. Not one little bit at all. He said, “I also terrorized some security guards and half a dozen Seattle cops,” though most of the discomfort had gone out of the confession.

  “I’m just glad nobody shot you. I was scared to death someone would. I’m really sorry about that, Michael. I had no idea it would happen. The dance performances…”

  “Were transformative.” Morrison’s eyes sparkled, noticing how I’d managed to use his first name, but neither of us said anything, like it was an elephant in the room. “It’s all right, Walker. I got over being upset right around the same time you said I love you.”

  It was my turn to blush. I bet we could stand here for a week taking turns at it. “Does that mean you’re going to let me turn you into a wolf again?”

  He groaned, turned to the vista, and pushed his hand through his hair. “Do I have any choice?”

  “Sure. I could try turning you into a puma or a horse or something, except a horse couldn’t get through the underbrush well and I bet anybody who saw us might take a shot at a puma with your coloring. Ghost puma. Anyway, I think the wolf was your choice, which suggests you’ve got an affinity, so it’s a better idea to try it.” A grin started working its way forward. “Is that your mental image of yourself, Morrison? A lone wolf, standing against the tide of evildoers? That’s very teenage epic fantasy of you.”

  He gave me such a flat look I laughed again. “It could be worse.”

  “Really. How?”

  “ siing againsYou could think of yourself that way and not be a hero.” I kissed him while he looked flummoxed, then got my drum out and beamed at him. “Take your clothes off.”

  “What?”

  “Take your clothes off. They don’t transform with you. You can carry them once you’re shifted.”

  For a while his expression remained steady and patient, like if he waited long enough there would be an explanation as to how he had ended up on the back end of American history about to strip naked and run through the woods as a wolf. When it became clear no explanation was forthcoming—because really, he already knew the answers—he took his clothes off while I fought between watching unabashedly and trying to find somewhere else to look.

  Watching won. He folded his shirt into his coat, toed his shoes off and stripped to his skivvies. He had an awfully nice body. Not overdeveloped, but not soft, either. Just right, like Goldilocks’s third bear. He said, “I’m not sure I’ve ever taken all my clothes off outside in broad daylight,” at the same time I said, “You know, I used to think you were kind of soft around the middle, but damn, Morrison.”

  Apparently we were both trying to distract ourselves from him taking his underwear off. It worked, anyway, and he sat down on the bundle of folded clothes, saying, “I knocked off ten or fifteen pounds last spring, after I realized the woman I was increasingly interested in was eleven years younger than me. I didn’t want to have a heart attack while she was still hale and hearty, if things worked out there. Your turn.”

  “My turn what?”

  “To take your clothes off.” He smiled at me. “If I’m going to sit here naked while you bang that drum, so are you.”

  I really wanted to find a viable argument, and really couldn’t. Morrison got a self-satisfied smirk as I pulled my shirt off, so I threw it at him. He caught it and folded it along with his own clothes. I muttered, “I don’t think I’ve ever taken all my clothes off outside in broad daylight before, either. Is this one of those things that’s supposed to bring couples closer together?”

  Morrison’s voice dropped somewhere below the belt. “That sounds like a better idea than shapeshifting.” Then, in a much more ordinary and amused voice, he added, “I didn’t know it was possible to blush that far down. You’re too thin, Walker.”

  I looked down and blushed even farther down. My navel was in danger of turning pink. “I didn’t, either. And I know. I keep eating, but all the shapeshifting really took it out of me.”

  “The shapeshifting?”

  “In Ireland.” There was a lot I hadn’t told him yet, and naked on a mountainside didn’t seem like quite the right time or place to do it. I started anyway, getting as far as “I,” and then ran into “Oh, hell.” I hadn’t drawn a power circle, and now I was naked. By the time I was done building one, I had moved beyond embarrassment into a comfortable Zen attitude, and clung to it with all my slightly Puritan little heart. Morrison tied our clothes and weapons into bundles, but otherwise watched the whole process with a grin that made him look about fourteen.

  The positive upshot of all that was there was a great deal of energy crashing around inside the power circle. Most of it was sexual and anticipatory, but it wasn’t difficult to channel it into shapeshifting magic. I called for Rattler, who awakened with a sense of approval. I wasn’t in the habit of doing things properly, like building power circingiffles and working up energy to help ease a transition from one form to another, but this time I’d done it right and he liked it. That helped, too, and so did Morrison having gone through the transformation process once before. He knew right down to his bones that I could do it, and so his bones were surprisingly willing to adapt to the new shape I poured them into.

  There was no drawn-out painful half-man, half-wolf aspect to the change. Shamanic shifting didn’t work that way, and from what I’d glimpsed with Tia Carley, neither did werewolf transformations. It was one, then the other, with little more than a shimmer of magic between the two to mark the transition. My power washed over Morrison in a gunmetal bath and left a huge silver-white wolf in his place. He took a very manlike sharp breath, but otherwise held himself still, becoming accustomed to the new form.

  That was much better than the first time, when he’d understandably panicked, given in to the animal brain, and run like hell. Delighted, I put my drum into the bundle of clothes and weapons, then turned my magic inward, slipping into—

  Not a wolf shape. Wolves were not my thing. Coyotes were. That hit Morrison like a blow, even in wolf form, and I felt him withdraw emotionally.

  Frustration bubbled up inside me. That was twice already Coyote had come between us, even though there was absolutely nothing with Coyote to come between us. And I couldn’t address the problem now, because as far as I knew, even humans shapeshifted into animals couldn’t speak like humans while in the animal form. To make it worse, Morrison gave a cranky snort, picked up his gear and trotted away with it in his mouth, clearly saying, “Let’s get on with it, Walker.”

  I was going to bite him as soon as my own mouth was free. Thus resolved, I picked up my gear, too, and we ran into the forests.

  *

  My ill temper couldn’t hold a candle to the joy of running headlong through wilderness. We were both enormously large canines, weighing the same as we did in our human forms. The clothes were mildly inconvenient, and my jaw got tired, so the first time we stopped for a brief rest I shifted back to human form. It took a while to repackage everything, but then I slung Morrison’s gun holster on him with his clothes and weapons stuffed into it. He squirmed a bit, but looked more satisfied with the results, so I hung mine on a branch so I could walk into it once transformed. Morrison managed, after some trial and error, to latch the shotgun’s holster around my ribs, and we were off again.

  We didn’t change back to human form for two days, instead hunting, drinking and sleeping as canines. Very little disturbed us, and our supremely sensitive senses of smell allowed us to avoid anything that might have chosen to. I had no idea how much distance we covered. My thoughts simplified: we were hunting. When we reached the quarry, the hunt would intensify. Until then, nothing mattered but reaching it.

  On the third day, the scent of blood came into the air. Morrison and I both slowed, tasting it, judging it and naming it:
human. It was still far off, but we were reaching our destination. Morrison cocked an ear and I shook my head. It was too soon to change back to humans. Too far to go, still. But we would have to be ever-more careful. Our size would make us seem dangerous, and Morrison’s brilliant white pelt would be a prize by itself.

  We knew what we were approaching: the tang in the air told us.

  It was e=“ze bstill a shock to burst into a mountain meadow and see a war being fought on the river plains below.

  Chapter Seventeen

  With Rattler at attention in the back of my skull, I changed to human form, then swiftly built a power circle around Morrison before calling up the magic to transform him. His first words were “Was that necessary?”

  “The power circle? Yeah, you need to see—”

  “The coyote.”

  For about three seconds I genuinely didn’t know what he meant. Then the top blew off my head and I flung my hands in the air. “For crying out loud, Morrison, are you serious? You’re thirty-eight years old! Are you really this insecure over my ex? I’ve known Coyote my entire life. He’s been my mentor since I was thirteen. He’s taught me most of what I know about magic. I’ve got an affinity for the shape through long familiarity, so what? It doesn’t mean I’m going to bail and go make little coyote puppies with him happily ever after. Seriously, you’ve been gnawing on this for three days?”

  “You wouldn’t turn me back into a man so we could discuss it.”

  I threw my hands up again. “Oh, my God! Really? You think I deliberately kept you in wolf form so we couldn’t talk about it? I just thought we were moving, Morrison, no reason to keep shifting back and forth. Canines have nice warm fur coats to sleep in, they hunt well, they can drink from streams more easily than humans. Are you serious? Holy crap, Morrison, seriously, where is the insecurity coming from? You’re the most secure person I’ve ever met. And I told you before, me, Cyrano, there’s nothing there. There could have been, in a whole different world, but no. It’s you, it’s been you all along, and I can’t believe you’re so damned worried about it! What do I have to do?”

  “Not shapeshifting into a coyote would help.”

  I put my face in my hands, dragged them down, and showed him the reds of my eyes. “You’re insane, Morrison. You’re bonkers. The coyote is as natural to me as a wolf is to you. What did you want me to do?”

  “You could have tried.”

  “No! No, I could not have. God dammit, Morrison, I turned into a werewolf, all right? I tried to kill Gary. Cernunnos nearly crushed my head, putting me in my place. I’m sorry, but no. I am not going to go down that road just to make you more comfortable. Almost anything else, yes. I will bend over backward to make you happy. But you’re just going to have to suck this one up, because the wolf might be your personal affinity, but in my pantheon it scares the crap out of me.”

  That was obviously the exact wrong thing to say. Morrison stiffened right up and I made gargling sounds of frustration in my throat. “Not you. You don’t scare the crap out of me except in the sense of yes, for God’s sake, I am in love with you and I have no idea how to deal with that because you may not have noticed but I’ve kind of got the emotional spectrum of a turnip but I’ve never been so happy to be this scared and—”

  I ran out of steam, my shoulders dropping as I looked away. We were both still naked. Having a naked shouting match on a mountainside should have been funny, but it wasn’t. Not at all. “You drove my car across the country, and I was happy,” I said dully. “Don’t you get that, Morrison? The onlingifouly other time somebody drove that car I just about ripped her ears off. But I was happy Petite brought you to me. I was happy to see you behind the wheel. You don’t get more inside me than that, Michael. You just don’t.”

  After a very long silence, he said, “You hadn’t told me about Muldoon.”

  I closed my eyes and sank down to fold my arms around my knees. “When have I had time?” It seemed like we’d been doing nothing but talking since we’d reunited, but we’d also been running hell for breakfast all over the countryside. I’d caught him up on what was going on in North Carolina. I hadn’t even touched on what had gone down in Ireland.

  Another very long silence passed before he said, “I’m sorry.”

  I laughed, a tired, broken little sound. “Me, too. Seriously, Morrison, what the hell.”

  “You’ve known him your entire life, you share a magic I can’t even touch, you have an affinity for his chosen animal form, you love him, he’s good-looking, and he’s your age.”

  “Jesus.” I pressed my fingertips against my eyes, then twisted my neck so I could see Morrison. “You’re really hung up on the age thing, aren’t you? I didn’t even know how old you were until I got a look at your driver’s license last year. It doesn’t matter. And I’ll share as much of the magic with you as I can, if that’s what you want, but you’re my rock, Morrison. You’re what keeps me connected. You’re what I want to come home to. Yeah, I love Cyrano, but I wouldn’t give up everything for him. I wouldn’t give up anything for him, when it came down to it, and it did. You, I’d…” I’d die for you was the way that sentence ended, but it wouldn’t be something Morrison wanted me to say or do, so I let it fade away.

  He heard it anyway, and said, “Don’t,” quietly, then came to sit beside me. He was warm, even not quite touching me, and I wanted to lean against him and shiver in his body heat. After a while he said, “I am hung up about my age. I always have been.”

  I laughed again, a tiny, high-pitched and not very happy sound that was intended as an invitation to explain that remark. He took it for what it was. “I wanted to be a cop ever since I was a kid. I took college courses so when I graduated high school I only had three years of classes to get through. I finished the academy six weeks before I turned twenty-one, so I was very aware of being the rookie who was just barely allowed to go into bars. I made detective three years later, as soon as it was possible. My hair started going silver when I was about twenty-six, and I was self-conscious about that, too. I got promoted to lieutenant after three years in Homicide, because Captain Nichols liked me, knew I was dedicated, and thought it would be good for the department to have new blood in its ranks. Because of that, I was thirty-three when I was made captain, and I was chosen over a lot of older, more qualified men.”

  Morrison exhaled slowly. “And now I’m just about the right age for people to start muttering about a midlife crisis, and I’ve fallen in love with a woman eleven years my junior. So, yeah. You could say I’m hung up about my age.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said again, a lot more softly this time, and did lean against him, shivering against his warmth. He put his arm around my shoulder, cautiously, and I shifted a little closer. “And I’ll be damned. The Almighty Morrison is human after all. You do have neuroses and flaws like the rest of us.”

  “The Almighty Morrison. Is that what you call me? I liked ‘Boss’ better. Or does thar. a wt mean I’m forgiven?”

  “You’re forgiven as long as you quit getting your knickers in a bunch over Coyote.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Then you’re forgiven. I had no idea you were so self-conscious about your age, Morrison. You’re, um.” I pressed my lips together, looking at the valley below us. “You’re a very private man. There’s a lot I don’t know about you.”

  “That,” he said, “may also be a source of my concern. You know Cyrano very well, and I’m aware I’m…” He chuckled very softly indeed. “Private. Is there a word that goes beyond that?”

  “Guarded. Discreet. Reserved. Chary. Restra—”

  Morrison held his hand up. “Chary, Walker? I know you have an English degree, but chary?”

  “How often does a girl get an excuse to pull a word like that out?”

  He breathed a laugh. “All right. I get the idea, anyway. Chariness ties into the age awareness. The privacy helps create a barrier that—”

  “Elevates you,” I said. Morrison
made a sound like he didn’t care for the choice of phrase, but he didn’t argue. “You’re the boss. It’s your job to know your people. It’s not their job to know you. It puts me at a disadvantage, Boss. You probably know me better than I know you, and to make it worse I’ve been wearing my heart not so much on my sleeve as smeared across Seattle for the past year. Not just about you, but with all of this. The magic. Everything. And you’ve been there for it all.” My eyebrows rose. “And apparently you fell in love with me anyway, which makes me worry about your judgment.”

  He laughed aloud this time, which was what I wanted. My heart ached, partly at the realization that I didn’t know him all that well, but more at having actually unearthed something about him, even if it was insecurity. Maybe especially because it was insecurity. I was a bundle of insecurity myself, so it was nice to know he didn’t actually have every aspect of his shit utterly, totally and completely together. “I want to go home,” I said against his shoulder. “I want to go home and learn more about you. Which means we need to get all this other crap dealt with, so if you don’t mind us going back to the part of the conversation where I thought the power circle was necessary…?”

  He grunted, suggesting he hadn’t actually heard me saying that. It seemed very guy of him, which also made me feel a little better. Perhaps the Almighty Morrison didn’t actually notice every single thing that went on in his jurisdiction, whatever he decided that might be. “You need to See what I See out there, Morrison. You need to See why I couldn’t risk performing magic openly. Get dressed first,” I advised, and did the same myself. It felt strange putting clothes on after three days in fur, but at least I warmed up. It wasn’t really cold, but the view was chilling even without adding the Sight in.