Rain

by Taryn Kincaid

  Gee visited less and less. The youth spent long afternoons hiking and exploring the hills and woods, then returning to the cabin to whittle animals and figurines on his porch. Sometimes whole woodland scenes, no bigger than a large man’s fist. She admired his artistry.

  Eventually, he gathered up his handiwork, carefully placed the objects in a tin box, and then ventured away from the cabin. He started going into a town. Not Los Lobos, though, where she suspected he came from, where the Black Hills Wolves pack held sway. But into Shady Heart, on the other side of the mountain, where her cat shifter family ran the county, sprawling outward from the somewhat seedy business district like an oil slick on the ocean.

  When he’d come home after that first foray, he no longer had his carved pieces. The next day he gathered fallen branches of green wood and began anew.

  After one trip to town, he’d returned with a battered old truck. She wondered if one of her relatives had sold the rattling junker to him. Cheated him, maybe. Another time, he came back drunk, followed by a hard-looking woman who tumbled from her car, wobbly on her feet. One of the easy floozies from her Uncle Cal’s place, she was sure. Males from miles around, both human and shifter, knew they could pay for pleasure—or anything else they craved—at the Graymarket Trading Company Saloon and Casino, Cal’s palatial den of decadence and iniquity in Shady Heart—which was not shady in the leafy meaning of the word, and had very little heart to speak of.

  Black eye makeup had streaked the female’s cheeks, circling her eyes like a raccoon. Too much blush, too much lipstick, too little dress. Definitely one of Cal’s flock. Human, probably. Too graceless to belong to Clan Goldspark, their mountain lion clan. And Summer hadn’t recognized her.

  How much had Brick paid for her?

  The woman stumbled toward him, grabbing onto his arm.

  Summer had swooped down with a brittle cry and flapped around the painted female, until the woman shrieked in terror and threw her arms up to shield her face. Then she left a sticky deposit in the whore’s teased hair and soared away. The soiled dove scrambled back into her car and sped down the mountain. Brick never brought another woman home.

  The following day, when he emerged from the cabin, rubbing his temples as if his head hurt, she’d peppered him with black walnuts. He held up his hands in surrender.

  “You can’t be jealous, Annabel Lee.”

  So he’d given her a name, had he? She liked that. She’d rained another batch of walnuts down on him, but more playfully. He caught some. Juggled. Standing in his clearing, looking up at the sky, tossing walnuts in the air and laughing. He had a deep, rich laugh. His laugh grew even deeper, richer over time. He fed the teasing, carefree, whimsical aspects of her nature. She looked forward to playing with him, to their game with the walnuts.

  But not as much as she now looked forward to him removing his shirt.

  One day, years earlier, he’d sat on his porch rocker whittling, whistling a little off-key, pausing to glance up occasionally, as if he knew he were being watched. A mischievous smile quirked his lips upward. When he finished, he placed a beautifully carved figure of a wolf on the railing.

  She hopped down to take a closer look. His best work yet. The detail stunned her, the knife strokes on the body making each whorl of hair of the creature’s furry coat distinct. The expression around the eyes, the mouth, one of wonder and bemusement, and just the right amount of devilry. Like Brick’s own. Hinting at the shaggy scruffiness of the carver in human form. She coveted the tiny sculpture. Wanted to grasp it and soar away, to hide it in her tree house for her and her alone. He’d winked, as if he knew.

  “Yours, sweetheart.”

  Then he’d brushed the shavings away, slid his knife back into the sheath on his belt, gathered up his tin box with the other objects he’d carved that week and, leaving the wolf on the porch rail for her, got into the truck and rumbled down the mountain.

  After he clattered away, she snatched up the little figurine, holding it carefully in her talons, and winged swiftly homeward. In her bedroom, she’d shifted to human form and held the small wolf to her heart, stroking the carved fur, warming the wood with her fingers, before tucking the figure beneath her pillow. She slept with one hand curled around the carving, and dreamed of him often.

  He left the cabin on a monthly basis. She never followed him, but returned to her own house, built into a tree in the woods on the edge of the town. She did not know—did not want to know—what he did when he went into Shady Heart. She knew the town and suspected. But she blocked those unwanted thoughts from her mind.

  Over the years, as the town’s animosity toward other shifters—particularly wolves, especially the wolves of the Black Hills Pack—grew, she feared for him also. But she told herself the cats would leave him alone as long as he minded his own business—something Brick excelled at—and spent his money in Shady Heart. And besides…he seemed to have no affiliation with Los Lobos or the Black Hills Pack anymore. He couldn’t pose any kind of threat to her Uncle Cal’s plans.

  One night, when the moon glowed full, Brick had come out of the cabin and howled up at the glittering orb, his voice hoarse, harsh, ragged. Caught in the grip of a compulsion he clearly could no longer fight. His clothes had seemed to choke him and he stripped them off down to his skin. Standing naked, face tilted to the light, he’d let the glow bathe him in silver.

  That may have been the moment. The moment when everything inside her shattered, became still, reformed, truly recognized the male before her. When her heart, already lent to him on a part-time basis, became his. Completely. Irrevocably.

  The considerable muscles he’d built up over the years took on added bulk as he dropped to his hands and knees, the air shimmering around him. His face twisted, his grimace somewhere between agony and orgasm, as his head grew, elongated, his nose lengthening and broadening into a muzzle, his mouth, his lips widening, stretching to accommodate fangs. His hair, oh. So sleek, so dense. So like the wolf he’d carved for her. His fur looked soft, lighter than his human hair, rich and tawny as butterscotch or melted caramel.

  Something happened to her the first time she watched him shift. Something raw. Something metaphysical. Something eternal. And undeniably hot.

  He’d bounded out of his yard and torn into the woods, racing below the moon. Athletic, graceful. Predatory and dangerous. She loved watching him shift, watching him running in his wolf form. Born into a clan of nocturnal cats, familiar and comfortable with the night, she soared into the skies above him, keeping pace, between him and the mother moon.

  Whenever he ran, she flew with him.

  Did he know?

  Of course, he knew. Except for those first few weeks of the healing process, when he’d seemed soul-dead and oblivious to the world, nothing escaped him. He possessed a wolf’s acute and finely honed predatory senses, his innate skills so far beyond a mere human’s ability to see, to scent, to hear.

  At dawn after that first full moon, he’d lain spread-eagled on the sweet, dewy grass, on his back in a fragrant wild-flower strewn meadow some distance from the cabin, his broad shoulders and huge chest heaving, sweat drying on his human skin, on the ridged muscles rippling from his slick pecs, down his flat abdomen, detouring to the chiseled ropes bracketing his carved hips. A dark ribbon of hair began below his navel, pointing the way, like a neon arrow, down his sin trail of delight. Jackpot.

  Her mind had blanked and she lost control, shifting so abruptly into human form she’d nearly toppled out of her tree. Heat poured over her, through her, as if she’d been tossed into a boiling cauldron. She’d never really thought about sex before. Suddenly it was all she could think about.

  Her breathing had hitched, her mouth hanging open. She took in shallow breaths, huffing them out. Panting. By the spirit of the Great Hawk. Panting. And her respiratory difficulty had nothing to do with the exertion of her flight, with their race in the moonlight. And everything to do with the potent, raw male strength displayed before her. Good
thing the abundant summer foliage had kept her out of sight.

  She hadn’t been able to tear her gaze from him. Her vocabulary failed her after spectacular. Magnificent. Powerful. Someone smarter than she needed to invent new words for this male.

  He’d blinked one eye open and stared up at the lightening heavens, searched the leafy boughs of the massive sycamore that hid her.

  Or did it?

  “A good run, wasn’t it, Annabel Lee?”

  His arms and legs spoked out from his sides.

  An enormous erection jutted skyward.

  He made no effort to hide it.