by Elsa Jade
Though he tightened every muscle to keep himself from moving, he saw his hand reach out toward Maddie.
And at his fingertips were claws.
If she turned and saw him like this, everything would change.
The merry ding-ding of a truck rolling up to the pumps sounded like a game show announcing he was a winner. Maddie would finally know him, would understand why he’d had to push her away even though her bright spirit had become the guiding moon in his quest to find another way to live.
But his pack, and all shapeshifters, would be the losers.
He finally understood his father’s parting words when he’d announced his decision to enlist and see the rest of the world. His father had forbidden his leaving, and he’d snapped, “It’s my life!”
“It’s not your life,” his elder had said. “Not just your life, not anymore.”
But he’d gone anyway. And now his father was gone, and here he was, half shifted and looming like a slavering monster behind the woman who’d given him a taste of freedom.
“Kane,” she said as she marched toward the open garage door. “You need to go—”
She started to turn, but he whirled on his heel, passed behind her, and was out into the glare of the falling sun before she could finish her sentence.
Or see what he had become.
*
Having burned through most of a tank in his conflicted temper, he hit the road winding up the mesa doing close to a hundred. The Mustang kicked out loose gravel in a hailstorm against the undercarriage, and Kane thought he could feel the sting in his own body.
The wolf had torn at him from the inside, infuriated at his restraint and desperate to get back to Maddie. It refused to see that the good of the pack couldn’t always be reconciled with the needs of the body and heart. To the beast, the world and the soul were one, the wolf and the woman had joined once and thus forever, the earth and sky which seemed so separate were only one whirling dust devil away from ecstatic union.
At last, as the aimless miles passed under the Mustang, it quieted because only opposable thumbs could work the squirrely stick shift.
Kane left the main road for an unmarked side road, little more than a wider spot between the juniper. Spindly sage brushed the sides of the car, smelling like heaven and sounding like lightest feathers caressing him, although he knew the scratches on the paint would be obvious in the slanting light.
Out here, everything left a mark.
Bearing mute witness to the dark thought, along his route, slashes marred the half-hidden trunks of the gnarled trees. The trees were ancient, and the scars were so long healed that the bark had curled inward, leaving only the vaguest shape of what the wounds had been. But he didn’t need to wonder at them because they matched the rocks on the other side of the cliffs and in the black ink on his own skin.
The devils of the mesa had been there.
His home.
He stopped the Mustang under a regal stand of ponderosas and stared at his hands.
No claws. The wolf was silent, listening not to him but to the whisper of the wind through the delicate needles overhead. The setting sun touched the highest boughs with gold against the still brilliant blue sky.
Leaving the car, he walked toward the log cabin set among the trees. Or not so much cabin as chalet. He’d seen an old sketch of the original home, only a miner’s shack a hundred and fifty years ago, but it had expanded. His great-grandfather had made it huge for the pack in the days before human hunters had winnowed all the predators—animal and inhuman both—in the area, and his grandfather had made it beautiful for his beloved true mate when they’d been some of the last standing. His father had made it a fortress.
Kane turned his gaze to the keystone above the arch of the front door and flattened his palm over his left pec. Archeologists would be incensed that the exquisite petroglyph had been stolen for such a purpose—not that they’d ever see it. Unlike the etched markings hidden throughout the mesa’s cliffs, this glyph would only shine in the last ray of light of the spring mating moon, welcoming the pack’s new pairs to their bonding night.
The perfect fusion of the golden wood and the silvery stone where he stood should have soothed the ache in his chest. He’d missed this so much when he was away, the longing a hollowness that no amount of food or fighting could fill. Home.
But here he was. And it wasn’t enough.
The front door opened silently, framing the darkness of the interior. Dark except for Bas’s white-blond hair and flashing grin.
“Welcome home, hero.”
Kane loosed the snarl he’d been holding onto for dear life.
Bas blinked. “Or you can just huff and puff instead.”
Shouldering past his cousin, Kane stalked through the house. All but blind to the soaring, exposed beams above, boots clomping on the flagstone floor, he took a deep breath, inhaling the memories and expectations, gusting out his last hour with a virulent curse.
Only the towering wall of windows brought him to a halt, and he trembled with the urge to smash through the glass. From here, he could just see the first lights of early evening coming on in Angels Rest below as the shadow of the mesa fell across the little town. The lights of the garage were the brightest. If he strained his eyes, could he see the candlelight flicker of a womanly shape crossing the headlights? The great room’s narrow, flanking windows were open like birds’ wings, and he lifted his head to the winds that drifted in from all directions, seeking one perfume out of thousands, one firewheel blossom out of a desert’s emptiness.
“She’s sure got you knotted up.” Bas’s voice behind him was a caustic mix of disgust and wistfulness. “Not literally, I hope, because that’s gnarly. Not to mention a dead giveaway.”
“I never fucked her as the wolf,” Kane growled. “She has no idea.”
“Never? Huh. Still, it was a good thing she ran when she did since the old man had decided she needed to go.”
Kane snapped his head around to glare at his cousin. “I gave her up.” There was no growl in his voice this time. Just flat menace. “I never understood him. What more did he want?”
“You to be what you were meant to be. Our brave, handsome, self-sacrificing hero.”
Bitterness—not all of it his own—twisted in Kane’s belly. “It should have been your brother.”
“Rafe was too young when Dad was killed. Your pop did what he had to. He stepped into the void and led the pack. Until you were ready.”
Slowly, Kane turned from the view. The window was already starting to chill with the coming of night. Or maybe the glass was reflecting the coldness inside him. “And am I ready?”
Bas tilted his head in a distinctly lupine gesture. It might preface a playful leap.
Or a kill.
After a moment, he flicked one fingertip past his jaw, quirked sideways with his toothy smile. “Are we ever?”
“What did my father think?” Kane couldn’t believe he was asking his annoying little cousin. But he had to know. “Before he died, did he say?”
Bas’s smile vanished. “He told Rafe to kill you if you faltered and take the alpha rank to lead the pack.”
For a heartbeat, Kane tried to throttle his reaction. But despite his effort, the laugh—his and his wolf’s—broke out. “And what did Rafe say to the old man?”
“To his face or after he walked away?”
“Whichever was the truth.”
Bas’s ice-blue eyes, so coldly at odds with the easy grin that appeared like a flashflood after a storm, glinted. “He said nothing to the old man. He told me the task was mine.”
When Kane lifted an eyebrow, Bas turned his gaze to the window, the town below, and the land that stretched away beyond, stark and yet beautiful in its seeming simplicity. “My brother was broken by the hunters’ attack that orphaned us,” he said softly. “When we were kids, I didn’t understand. I thought he was silent from grief. Or maybe plotting vengeance. I liked that idea. Later, I realized it was j
ust…emptiness.”
Kane frowned. “Rafe has gone rogue?”
“No,” Bas said quickly. Too quickly. “If he was too young then to walk the alpha’s path, he was too young to run rogue. But…” He shrugged one shoulder, an awkward gesture compared to his usual effortless grace. “He’s always stood apart from all of us. Even me. And every year he is more distant. I think, maybe, he wishes he was one of the petroglyph wolves out there on the mesa, turned to stone.”
Unaccountably, this time Kane was pissed at his older cousin. “He cares so little for our pack he wouldn’t kill me if he had to?”
“He cared enough to let me do it,” Bas protested.
Kane snorted. “And you think you could?”
“If I had to,” Bas shot back.
“So will you?”
The question hung for a moment in the gathering night.
“Our fathers,” Bas said finally, “lived in another time. What we do now is not up to them anymore. It’s on us.”
Kane studied the other male, wondering at the depths he hadn’t seen before in the younger cousin who’d applied himself to stealing liquor and cigarettes and porn site passwords with more zeal than any classroom study or chore assigned to him. He was wild in ways a wolf never dreamed of. And maybe more wily than the troubles that haunted them.
“I appreciate you not putting me down the second I stepped onto pack lands,” he said at last.
Bas grinned. “Oh, I’ll kill you yet if it comes to that. But not because someone else told me to do it.”
The last light of the sun was still in the sky but where the eastern horizon had been darkening, it silvered again with the hint of coming moonglow.
A reminder, Kane thought, that the chase was eternal. As were the death—and the life—that came of it. The mating moon was upon them, a different kind of chase, not meant to be so dire and yet so it had become as their choices dwindled.
He breathed out slowly, tasting Maddie still on the back of his tongue.
“We are supposed to be creatures of change,” he mused.
Bas snorted. “Sure. And that’s why we’re carved in stone.”
But Kane was thinking of rising heat and yielding flesh and a seer’s ever-shifting eyes. Although, yeah, his body was hard as stone. “We will be free,” he said softly.
As if in answer, a howl lifted on the wind, faint with distance.
In one matched stride, Kane and Bas went to the windows, listening.
Again it came, rising. Fainter and distorted, an echo bounced back.
“That’s coming from out by the cliffs,” Kane said.
“It’s Rafe,” Bas replied, certainty and worry clipping his words. “He was out earlier checking the petroglyphs. He saw a camper trailer farther back than it should’ve been.”
They both whirled and headed for the door.
Kane cast a wry look at his younger cousin. “But you swear he’s not rogue.”
“I don’t swear,” Bas said. “Swearing scares away the good girls.”
Kane jumped into the Mustang, his cousin a half step behind. “Since when do you want a good girl?”
“I guess this mating moon thing is making us all crazy.”
But that hadn’t been a mating call. It was a hunting song. A death song.
And someone was going to answer.
Chapter Seven
‡
“Gosh darn it.” Dare kicked the flat tire of her aunt’s Fiat.
Maddie rolled her eyes at her friend from where she crouched beside the crippled car with the useless lug wrench. “Well, that helped.”
“If we could just get the nuts loosened…”
“Oh, the nuts are loose all right.”
Darling scowled, her hands on her hips, her sassy ass emphasized by the big floral pattern on her cute pedal pushers. In her flouncy white blouse, she looked like she was on the way to a picnic, not a desert expedition. “You didn’t have to come up here tonight. I could’ve gotten the pictures myself.”
Maddie stuffed down a surge of irritation. She wasn’t mad at Dare or even the plucky little car that had at least made it to the top of the mesa before the bald tire gave up the ghost to what looked like a giant can opener blade. The metal—strangely shiny, considering the exposure to the elements on the high plateau—had gashed through the rubber badly enough that replacement was the only option. “Silly. Then you’d be stuck up here alone. And we’d all be worried sick about you since you refuse to carry a phone.”
Darling sniffed. “They never work when you need them. And no one calls anyway.”
“Well, besides, I wanted to come.” Maddie held her hand out to her friend and let Dare pull her to her feet. “I’m just mad at myself.”
Mad girl. That’s what he’d called her. Mad angry or mad insane? She wasn’t sure which was worse. “I’ve never met a tire I couldn’t change.”
Dare shot her a quick, sympathetic grin. “I lost a book in the stacks once, for almost a whole day. I was absolutely beside myself.”
Maddie kicked the tire next to the rusted lug nuts before smiling back at her friend. “Actually, that does make me feel better, doesn’t it?”
Dare sighed. “I’m a terrible person, but I feel better knowing you can’t master everything you set your hands on.”
Another flash of arrogant male in her mind’s eye made Maddie wince. She definitely hadn’t mastered him, despite having her hands all over him. She understood him less than the first internal combustion engine she’d disassembled. Kane had said he envied her freedom when all she’d ever felt was lonely, and now Dare interpreted having no one else to rely on as independence. Apparently no one could ever truly understand what someone else was going through.
With a snort, Maddie carried the wrench back to the boot. Equal in proportion to the size of the car, the spare tire and the iron were barely more than toys. “Well, you should feel awesome about yourself, because I seem to suck at almost everything these days.”
“No way.” Dare threw her arms around Maddie in an enveloping hug. For a moment, she stiffened in surprise, then she sagged into the simple comfort of her friend’s soft, bergamot-scented embrace. “I missed having you around. Who else would do something this nutty with me?”
Maddie hugged her back. “No one. And with good reason. Which means we have to get your photos no matter what since we’re the only ones out here.”
She grabbed her satchel from the front seat with the phone that was as useless as the wrench at the moment plus a bottle of water. She fished through the boot and found a flashlight. Just in case. She threw it in her satchel and started to close the hatch. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she grabbed the wimpy wrench too. Rattlesnakes sometimes curled up in cliffs, catching the last of the sun’s warmth, and the vibrations of the metal rod tapped against the rocks would warn them of intruders before said intruders stepped on them and got bit.
She whirled the steel once in her hand and closed up the car before turning to Darling. “The petroglyphs aren’t far from here. You take those pictures you want and we should be able to get a cell signal while we’re out on the cliffs. I’ll call Chuck to bring his flatbed and we’ll haul ass back to the shop, change the tires—all of them—and be drinking at Gypsy’s before Aunt Betsy realizes we stole her car.”
“Borrowed,” Dare qualified as they set out on foot along the gravel road. “For a joyride.”
“You can swap definitions with the new county sheriff’s deputy. The waitresses at Gramma’s said he came down from Seattle, so I bet he’ll be interested in how we do things differently in this here town.”
They snickered to each other and chatted as they walked. They were both in sneakers—Maddie’s grease stained from the shop, Dare’s a cheery green and orange check—which would’ve been fine on the larger rocks of the cliffs where the petroglyphs were, but on the gravel road, they had to keep stopping to empty little rocks from their shoes. Though the conversation was lively, Maddie realized the sun
was sinking faster than she’d have thought.
Luckily, they popped around a bend and saw the cliff spires right ahead. Although most of Mesa Diablo was flat topped, the tougher basalt rocks had stood against the wear and tear of time and thrust upward twenty or thirty feet in places before falling away to the valley floor below. In those older stones, ancient peoples had chipped the petroglyphs into the rock and sometimes added pigments of charcoal, manganese, and iron oxide, making pictographs in shades of black and red.
Archeologists had declared the site of little academic value because the images weren’t as clear as at other sites and the dating of the finds was muddied by overlapping layers of carving and painting, only some of which were considered legitimate. Maddie had missed learning the area’s history in gradeschool like most of the children of Angels Rest, but she’d explored the cliffs a couple times with Dare, who hadn’t been at all excited to leave her books just to “tromp through the dirt” as she called it. Now as they rounded the tallest outcropping of stone, Maddie thunked the wrench against the nearest rock a couple times with a muttered “wakey, wakey, rattlesnakey.” Again, she felt that sense of eternity, of relentless geologic time that was nevertheless touched by hands like hers.
She looked up… There it was, the first pictograph. In a shallow indentation naturally protected by a slight overhang, somebody had left a hand mark. Sometime long ago, he—Maddie imagined it was a man, judging by the height up the wall and the width of the spread fingers—had placed his hand against the stone and through a hollow tube, perhaps a reed or a bird’s bone, had blown a mouthful of water tinted with rust—iron oxide—and left an outline of his reach that had outlasted him by many lifetimes.
Maddie’s fingers twitched with the urge to cover that palm with her own, but she knew better than to let her sweat mar the ancient message. Dare stepped around her to snap a photo of the handprint.
She took a couple shots before letting the camera dangle around her neck. “I want to touch it, you know?” Her voice was low, respectful, with a quiver of yearning. Of course, she was a historian herself—though not as far back as this—so no wonder she was drawn to it.
