by Joyce, T. S.
She would never, ever make that mistake again. Love, or whatever amounted to love, was off the table from here on. Love had starved her and hurt her heart, and he’d been able to walk away so easily. From day one, she’d told him what she was and wasn’t willing to put up with, but he’d broken every rule, one by one, as if he was testing her to see how long until she cracked. Fucker. Elyse sniffled and wiped her eyes. She’d let a man ruin her. Uncle Jim would be rolling over in his grave if he saw how weak she’d been with Cole. He would’ve never given her this place in his will if he’d known how pathetic she would turn out. Well, no more!
She knew what she could and couldn’t do. She couldn’t run this homestead by herself. Not with the cattle and the other livestock to take care of, and not when she couldn’t leave the animals long enough to hunt game meat for the winter. She needed a helpmate, and this time she was going to do it better. She was going to be stronger. Uncle Jim had put an ad in the newspaper for a helpmate when he’d needed one, and he’d been rewarded with Marta, who’d worked this place beside him for twenty years before she passed. He’d found the exact partner he needed to run this place, and that’s just what Elyse aimed to do, too. No more romantic bullshittery or fairy-tale notions. She would find a good, capable husband who would just happen to be fantastic at leading the subsistence lifestyle this place required. She was going for the man with the strong back and leaving love off the table completely. A wise woman learned from her mistakes, and Cole McCall had been the biggest, most disappointing mistake of all.
Her cell phone rang, and she tossed it a glare before she moved to a box with precious few carrots left in it. Half of those were rotted, too, and it became abundantly clear that her rationing hadn’t been doing her any favors. The vegetables were old and going bad. No amount of cool, moisture-free air and sawdust packing could keep them edible forever.
Another ring, and she wiped the sawdust from her palms to her jeans and picked up the phone that was about to jump off the wooden stool she’d set it on. She didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“Uh…” There was a pause that was too long to be polite.
Elyse narrowed her eyes. “Cole, if this is you, fuck off.”
She went to end the call, but the man said, “No, no, wait,” in a deep, gravelly voice that was definitely not Cole’s. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think you would pick up.”
“Well, you called me. What do you want?”
“Cole McCall. Have you seen him?”
Elyse sank down to the stool and bit her thumbnail. “Who wants to know?”
The man gave off a nervous laugh. Deep and rich, like his voice. “Look, I’m sorry for interrupting—”
“Does he owe you money?”
“No.”
“Did he bang your sister?”
The man cleared his throat and sighed. “No.”
“Mister, I haven’t seen Cole in months. I booted his ass out of here mid-winter. I haven’t seen him at my homestead or in town. His brothers still hang around the bar in Nulato, though, if you want to ask them.”
“Okay. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. Miss, are you crying?”
“Of course not.” She wiped her tears with the back of her hand and swallowed hard. “I never cry.” Stupid sniffles were giving her away.
“Over Cole?”
“Ha,” she huffed.
“I’m a complete stranger who you’ll never meet.”
Elyse forced herself to stop biting her nail—a bad habit she couldn’t seem to break—and leaned back against the stone wall of the root cellar. “Not over Cole. Over the situation he left me in.”
“What situation?”
“It’s nothing. I’m fine, just angry with myself. Everything will work out. It always does.” She’d been repeating those lies for the last three snowy months.
“Hmm,” the man said noncommittally, as if he didn’t believe her lies either. He had a nice sort of voice. Calm and deep, but with a gravelly rasp, as though he didn’t use it often. She couldn’t get a grasp on his age, though. He could be twenty or sixty. She smiled and imagined he was twenty-six like she was. Food for thought since there weren’t many people her age in Galena.
“Elyse Abram?”
She froze. He knew her whole name, and the way he said it, so formally, sounded so strange against her ear. “Yes?”
“If you need anything, you call this number, and I’ll get it to you. Food or anything. No strings attached.”
“What?” She sat up straighter against the cold stool. “But…you don’t even know me.”
“That’s okay.”
She waited the span of three breaths, her mind racing round and round. No man had offered her help out of the blue…well…since before she met Cole, and even then, it was kind neighbors who had a stake in helping her out. She had repaid their kindness and more as soon as she had been able. But complete strangers didn’t offer help. They just didn’t.
The line was quiet, the man still waiting, and for lack of a better answer, she murmured, “Okay,” knowing she would never call this number again. Her pride was as big and wide as a canyon, and asking for help from someone she couldn’t repay reeked too much of charity. And she was no charity case. “It was nice talking to you.”
The man’s voice softened as he said, “You, too, Elyse Abram.”
The line went dead, and Elyse stared at the screen until long after it had gone dark. She couldn’t believe that five minutes ago she was thinking there wasn’t a decent man left on earth, and then one had called her unexpectedly.
Perhaps that was a sign.
Not everyone was as broken as Cole McCall, so maybe she could stop being so mad at the world and get on with living already.
And the first step to doing that was putting the ad in the newspaper, just like Uncle Jim had done all those years ago.
She would be damned if she was going to come out of another Alaskan winter this hungry.
****
Whatever situation Cole had put Elyse Abram in made Ian want to kill him twice. Some put-down orders haunted him. The ghosts of his marks seemed to cling to him. His animal wasn’t a killer for sport. He was defensive when cornered and could hold his own with any shifter who went on the attack, but being an enforcer wasn’t a choice. It was a career chosen for him by his lineage. Grizzly shifters were rare, and they were the biggest of all the were-animals. He and his brothers existing at all kept most of the shifters in Alaska in line. But sometimes when his hand was forced and someone went mad, hurt humans, or threatened to expose their kind, he had to hunt them when his animal didn’t see the point.
With Cole, it was different.
Inside, his bear was snarling to get the damned deed done already. And for the first time in as long as he could remember, Ian was concerned his bear was actually going to enjoy putting someone down. It was that little sniffle Elyse had made. That tiny noise had his bear churning in his gut, roaring to get out and bleed something.
What Elyse hadn’t known when she gave him the whereabouts of Cole’s brothers was that Ian was calling her from the bar in Nulato. Currently, he was sitting a mere thirty miles down the Yukon River from her homestead. So close.
Ian fingered the napkin under his beer and lifted his narrowed eyes to a pair of scraggly werewolves talking low between themselves in the darkest corner. Even from here, his nose burned with the stink of alcohol wafting off them. They must be in some kind of important conversation if they’d missed him sauntering in. He’d showered and trimmed his beard, and sure, he looked human enough right now, but there was no mistaking the scent of bear that clung to him, and werewolves had impeccable senses of smell.
Miller’s nostrils flared, and he jerked his pissed-off glare to Ian. There he was—alpha of the McCall pack and general asshole. Lean as a whip, disheveled, greasy hair, and a shade of blue eyes that screamed “somethin’ ain’t right.” Wild Miller, dipping his toe into the insanity pool, too.
> He stomped over, his untied boots clomping with every step. “I know what you’re doin’ here.”
“Sit down.”
Miller slammed his fist against the table and leaned into Ian, eyes lightening by the second. “You tell that cunt-licker, Clayton, to take the order back.”
Ian kicked the chair across from him out from under the table and looked pointedly. “Sit down, or I’ll be hunting you next.”
Miller glanced back at his brother, Lincoln, who was still glued to his chair in the corner, ear turned, listening easily. Gritting his teeth, Miller sat down across from Ian and clasped his hands on the table. “He didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”
Ian laughed once and shook his head. “That’s the way you want to play this? You know what he’s done. Three strikes, McCall. If you didn’t want this, you should’ve kept your dog on a tighter leash.”
“He bit one trapper, but it ain’t like we can Turn anyone. Just a harmless little nip.”
“Bit one multiple times and dragged him through the woods, killed the next, and I know about the little girl, Miller, so stop the bullshit and tell me where he is.”
“I ain’t tellin’ you shit.” Miller leaned back in his chair with a smile and spat onto the wooden floor. “And you ain’t never gonna find him, Silver, you big. Dumb. Fuck. He’s off grid and out of your swatting range. You can give Clayton a personal message from me and my pack.” Miller lifted his middle finger and canted his head, his mad grin stretching even wider.
Off-grid and out of swatting range, and Miller was narrowing down his search area quite nicely. Cole would be in an old rundown cabin he thought everyone forgot about then. One without an airstrip around for Ian to land his plane.
Ian gave him a dead smile and downed his beer, then stood. “You have a nice day now, Miller. I’ll see you around.” Probably sooner than later and at the order of Clayton.
Miller stood so fast he blurred, breaking the rules and showing some of his strength to the unassuming humans staring at them from the bar top.
“Careful, doggy,” Ian said low.
“If you go after my brother, know this, Silver. I will summon every McCall in Alaska to my side. Me and my pack will hunt you down. You won’t be able to find a safe enough place to hide from us. And we’ll take our time about it, too. Maybe we’ll kill your brothers first. Eye for an eye and all that.”
“Tell them hi,” Ian said blandly. “I haven’t talked to the pricks in three years. Stay safe, McCall.”
The threat in that was intentional, and Miller had the good sense to keep his trap shut as Ian walked out of the bar.
The urge to visit Elyse Abram’s homestead was overwhelming. It was more than idle curiosity that had him hesitating before walking back to the airstrip outside of town. He was so close and hadn’t visited Galena in two years. He’d been all over Alaska, both on tracking jobs like this one and as a bush pilot, delivering anything and everything that needed to be delivered. But now that he was thirty miles away from her town, the instinct to linger was almost too hard to ignore.
She was the recent mate of a werewolf, though, and a sensible bear didn’t touch another predator shifter’s claim. But even so, when Ian had talked to Elyse Abram on the phone, it had sounded like whatever Cole had done to her had hurt her badly, and the want to comfort her somehow made it hard to put one foot in front of the other right now. His gaze was drawn time and time again to the main road that led out of town to where she lived up in the wilderness.
No. Ian shook his head to rid himself of the temptation. The best thing he could do for her was put down Cole, and make sure the crazy wolf didn’t lose what was left of his mind and go after her. She’d dodged a bullet by escaping a relationship with a shifter, and Ian would be damned if he was the bigger, more damaging, bullet she stepped in front of. She deserved a nice, normal, human mate, or husband, or whatever they were called.
His boots crunched through the late winter snow as he strode purposefully toward the landing strip where he’d parked his plane.
Meeting her, and allowing his bear see and smell her, was a terrible idea. What did he have to offer anyone? He slept half the year, and the other half was filled with enforcing and running plane deliveries in a mad rush to earn enough money for the food he needed to eat for the next hibernation.
No, she was much better off without knowing he even existed.
Everyone was.
Chapter Three
The little girl had been attacked twenty miles outside of Kaltag, and the trapper attacks were within a thirty mile range of that as well, so Ian would start there. If Cole had moved on, he would have a better chance of finding where to if he canvassed the village. McCalls were notorious freeloaders, and unless Cole was going straight wolf, he would be in town begging for food, money, gas for his snow machine, whatever.
There were a dozen old homesteader cabins that had been abandoned out there, too, so he would check those out while he was in the area and hope to get lucky.
Outside of town, he prepped his plane and took off. It was a short flight to Kaltag, and he began circling out from there. From the plane, he could make out two old dilapidated one-roomers through the trees with a lot of animal tracks around them. Cole would’ve traveled here by snow machine, or maybe he’d gone wolf to get way out here.
Another sure sign that Cole had been squatting here and not just passing through was there were no manicured landing strips. Cole would want to make it difficult for Ian to get to his hidey hole, and from way up here, scanning the snowy tundra below, dotted heavily with evergreen trees, Ian was going to have a hard time landing safely.
If he was Cole, he would’ve picked a similar place to hide out. Think like the prey. That’s what dad had taught him, Tobias, and Jenner when they’d first shifted at age sixteen. And Dad had been the best tracker there ever was. Any advice Ian had gleaned from him during his youth was now worth more than gold.
He took the last bite of yet another apple and tossed the core onto the pile in the passenger’s seat of his little four-seater plane.
Ian narrowed his eyes at a strip of smoothish landing space, covered in what looked like thinner snow. From the long tracks, someone had used it since the last snowfall to land, so that was going to have to be good enough. He had the skis on the landing gear, but still, one wrong move and his lightweight plane could be smashed to pieces with him in it. Now, he had decent shifter healing, but he sure loved his ride, and he hadn’t crashed yet. A couple of close calls, but nothing too damaging.
He circled around, assessing the makeshift landing strip, and sure enough, there were definitely sled marks in the snow, revealing it was thin enough to land if he took the angle just right. He lined up and dipped the nose slightly, lowering himself slowly to the glittering snow. It would be dark soon, and he needed to make some tracks before nightfall. If Cole was still here, his brothers would’ve likely called to warn him. But if he’d been spending time as a wolf all day, Ian still had a shot at catching him by surprise.
His heart drummed against his sternum as he lifted up enough to straighten out, and his landing gear skied across the snowy straightaway. It was rough and jostled the plane, and at the end, he turned a bit wonky, but it was a better landing than he could’ve hoped for way out here.
It was cold as balls, so he blanketed the plane to make less work for him when he returned. It took time prepping the Cessna, but it would be worth it later, especially if he came back out here after dark.
He tossed the apple cores in the woods for the hungry winter birds to pick up, then pulled on his fox fur hat, sunglasses, and mittens. He could stand the cold a lot better than humans, but Alaska was brutal at night, and any windchill made it even more miserable. Despite the frigid temperatures, this was just how he liked to hunt. Snow made it easy to track anything. Animal scat was stark against the white, and tracks were easy to see and identify. He could read entire stories in the snow if he took the time to interpret the signs.
&nb
sp; Ian pulled a giant pack of beef jerky from his backpack and tore into it as he made his way from the plane toward the woods in the direction of the most promising cabin he’d seen from the air.
How was his stomach growling while he was feeding it? Little beggar was always obnoxious until he put on that first twenty pounds.
It was nearly dark when he scented animal fur. He was close to the cabin now, and the tracks in the snow were definitely wolf. He couldn’t have gotten this lucky. It wasn’t possible. Cole wasn’t this stupid to be right out where he could see from a plane.
But when he stepped through to the clearing of the cabin’s yard, low and behold, Cole McCall himself was standing in the doorway, as if he’d been waiting for him.
The hairs on the back of Ian’s neck lifted, and he slowed to a stop just inside of the tree line.
“It ain’t a trap,” Cole drawled out. His head twitched, and his eyes blazed for a moment before they dimmed again.
“Cole, you gotta problem, man,” Ian said as he lowered his backpack to the snow beside his boots.
“Clayton?”
Ian nodded once.
It was hard to tell behind Cole’s thick beard, but it looked like his lip ticked once. He inhaled deeply and pushed off the door frame. “Is it death?”
Ian nodded again, then looked around pointedly. The cabin was old, maybe eighty years, and the roof had gone to rot and caved in at some point. “You didn’t pick the best hiding spot. You made it too easy.”
“Yeah, well I wasn’t hiding from you. I was hiding from her.”
“I don’t understand.”
Cole twitched his head again and let off a long, low snarl, then swallowed it down. The hairs lifted on Ian’s arms despite the warm winter jacket. Crazy always heckled his instincts. Crazy was unpredictable and could get a man killed if he wasn’t careful.
