"Start with telling me how many of you there are?" I demanded.
"There are a few."
"How many?"
"You'll see if you stay."
"I thought you would tell me what I wanted to know."
"Well it's not every day I find a woman, a she-wolf, excuse me, trembling in the bushes with a bullet in her ass. I couldn't really say at this point whether your friend or foe. It would be foolish of me to tell you how many we are."
"Just as foolish as it is for me not to ask."
She smiled. "If you are a friend, you are among friends. There are enough of us to keep you safe if you need safety."
"Politician," I said. "Talking in riddles."
"Not so many riddles, just so much reality. A person doesn't come upon my home easily. Shifters less so." She eyed me speculatively. "So why were you in the bushes? Were you running from someone or were you running to take someone?"
At this point, her gaze grew hard and for a second I realized that this old woman would have been a warrior in her day. I peered at her, trying to assess what kind of day that might have been. I knew some shifters could live five hundred years or more if they weren't hunted down and murdered, but it was rare to find one that old. Even my father had only lived to three hundred or so before Caleb had killed him. This she-wolf was kind and seemingly compassionate on the surface, but beneath those bi-colored eyes lurked evidence of a cunning and determined fighter.
"I didn't even know you existed let alone trying to take someone from you." I shrugged to show her that whatever it was she had here, it was of no consequence to me.
"I'm running from a male." I dangled my feet over the edge of the bed, testing for weakness. When they seemed strong enough to hold me, I placed my feet on the floor, letting the flannel nightgown swirl around my ankles.
She laughed outright with a tinge of sarcasm. "I would never have guessed."
"I was imprisoned by an alpha who took over my pack in the old-fashioned way."
"You mean he fought your old alpha and won." She cocked her old hip and in the faded jeans she wore, I might have thought her to be at least two hundred years older than my father. I decided to risk it.
"Meaning he assassinated my alpha and my family. He's not strong enough to hold the pack together without me."
She gave me a thoughtful look. "So he wants to force the bond."
I nodded. "I thought I would die before I let that happen, but I have brothers." I turned away at that, not wanting to let her see in my face what the admission did to me. My failure. My cowardice. My mother would have lashed me with a silver chain if she'd known, and maced me till my eyelids were swollen.
The venerable woman eased herself down onto an old -looking rocking chair across the room from me, seeming to want to give me the distance I needed to gather myself. I toyed with the spoon in the bowl, making it clang against the edges.
She let this go on for several moments before she spoke again, poking out her hand and waiting until I took it in a formal shake.
"My name is Dara," she said.
"I'm--"
"I know who you are, Shana," she said. "You're Lynden's assassin."
I started. "You knew my father?"
She pursed her lips. "I don't let a pack move so close to my lands and not know who the leader is."
She watched me closely as I tried to process the information.
"You want to know if he knew about me?" she said.
I didn't need to answer. I imagined it was all over my face.
She sighed. "I don't think he knew I was here. My lands are broad, but my home is--was--small when you all built. Me and A she-wolf or two a year I tended and then they moved on."
"Tended?"
"Tended," she echoed. "Those needing care because they've been mistreated like you have been. They all left their packs because of abuse. Unfortunately, the unkindness of man isn't contained to the human world." She pursed her lips as though she were trying to dam up further information.
"You don't have to talk about what brought you here," Dara said. "Just know that you are safe and you are welcome. "
"No," I said. "I can't stay. These men are dangerous."
"I've dealt with dangerous men before."
I shook my head. "Not this kind of dangerous. Caleb will kill you if he finds me here." Though I was happy to be covered with a nightgown for warmth, I couldn't stay like that. I either had to shift or had to get dressed. Dara watched me with a speculative eye as I peeled the nightgown up over my stomach. Shift, it was.
She averted her gaze to the bowl, but I had the feeling she did so for my benefit and not because she was uncomfortable with my nudity.
"You may shift if you like, but it won't heal the exhaustion or rid your mind of your trauma. You know it as well as I do."
I eyed her from the neckhole of the nightgown as I hitched it up as far as my neck. "That doesn't matter."
"It does. You won't get far if you're exhausted. Shift if you must to heal your wounds, but you're welcome to stay here for as many days as you need to recover." She got up after that, not waiting to see what my response might be, and she crossed the floor to pick up the bowl, plucking the spoon from my fingers and tapping it on my cheek lightly.
"Use the time. No one will bother an old woman." She gave a wan smile. "If they do, they will find that beneath this old woman is a fierce wolf."
I managed a weak smile. It would be good to rest for a few days. I knew I was in no shape to continue.
Plus, it would feel good to have the earth beneath my padded feet once more.
"One day," I said. "And even that may be too long."
She wrapped me in a warm embrace, her sweatered bosom pressed matronly against my naked one. Then she pulled away with a beaming smile on her lips.
"One day is plenty for you to see it's not enough."
Picnicing with Wolfs
Dara left me to my own devices and when I wasn't sleeping I spent my time wandering around her small farmyard in shorts and a tank top she'd somehow scrounged for me. They were far from perfect fit, but they were clean and I was grateful. The property sprawled over a vast piece of ground and harboured a host of chicken coops and pig pens that put me in mind of an Appalachian homestead. Dara's house perched atop a swell in the ground, taking up at least 1200 square feet. Not a big bungalow by any means, but seemed built around a communal eating area with a broad open fireplace whose floor level hearth was made of soot-blackened slate. Something simmered in a pot over a tripod all day, but I didn't dare peek inside the cast iron pot. A library took up an entire wall, filled with herbals and mythology books, physiology manuals, and an entire section devoted to fiction, but no one filled the well-worn sofa chairs with books in hand. I imagined the farm took far too much time for such decadent pleasures as reading.
Outside, chickens squawked about the grounds, chased off when they got too close to the steps by an adolescent hound. As I strolled, I noted a couple women in various states of age, some of them working the land, some of them caring for the few children. I caught sight of an herb garden next to Dara's house, and I found a young woman close to my age digging through the dirt. She looked up when she heard me and I didn't have the chance to slip away.
Her mousey look was magnified by black oil drop eyes that darted up and down my frame in appraisal.
"So you're her," she said.
I spread my arms in the spirit of open friendliness, guessing my appearance might be a bit frightening to a timid little mouse, what with the scars that I knew showed on my bare arms and legs. "I guess I am."
Her trowel paused in the dirt and I noticed she had an uneven black tattoo on her wrist that had no fully articulated shape or definition. "Dara said you won't be staying."
I shook my head at the probing tone. I was never good with women. "Too dangerous."
She laughed and it made her plain face light up in a way that made me realize she was actually very pretty.
"Honey,
" she said. "It's dangerous for all of us."
She leaned back, showing me full view of her torso from neck to belly and for the first time I noticed she had large bruises on her bare shoulders. The tank top she wore was tight-fitting enough that I could tell she wasn't wearing a bra but she didn't seemed embarrassed about it. Not exactly the kind of thing a timid mouse would do. I chewed my lip in thought and without meaning to, I took in and processed every aspect of her demeanour and then analyzed the result, a remnant of the ingrained training of assessing threats in a few seconds. In those spare heartbeats, most would believe her to be a runaway from a bad marriage. They'd believe her ex to be revoltingly fat wolf named BillyBob who brewed his own whiskey out back of his shack. A lesser wolf would decide if she wasn't that kind of girl, then the judgement was merely a result of the environment contaminating the psyche of the mind doing the judging. That tattoo said otherwise. She had either submitted to or invited a homemade ink mark. That kind of pain tolerance wasn't for sissies. I found myself wondering at the predicament that sent her here and started to question the evidence of my own senses. Perhaps I was reading into that mark more than I should.
She sighed heavily, arching her back and laying that tattooed hand across the swell between back and hip.
"Is everyone here like you?" I asked her.
"What? A wolf?" She said, eyes narrowing.
So she would make me say it. Fine. I wanted to know what kind of people I was dealing with here, what packs they were from and who would come looking for them before Caleb came for me. If Caleb and his men sought me out and found me here, I needed to know how bad a liability these women would be. And if they were a liability, I needed to know whether or not they were worth my time to save.
I gave her a direct stare. "Bruised."
I expected her to be offended and when she merely quirked a very black brow, I got the sense she kept her own counsel on what she thought of strangers.
"I'm Shana," I said, sticking out my hand, impressed, too, by her stoic receipt of the question. Not one to be bullied, this.
She pushed herself up from her knees and wiped her hands on her jeans. Then she stuck her hand out and gripped mine solidly. She had a good grip, had a fighter's hands. Sturdy and heavy boned.
"I'm Rena," she said and stood back as though she too was dying to make an assessment. I spread my arms out from my sides, inviting what I suspected would be a frank judgement. Her mouth twitched at the corner but her eyes stayed glued to my face. I felt somehow more under scrutiny than if she'd ran a questing hand along my muscles or inspected my teeth.
I'd never been good at conversation, and I had just about exhausted my arsenal of social niceties. Suddenly at a loss, I looked around the garden, floundering for conversation. I'd been alone so often as a assassin, that I didn't get much opportunity to socialize with anyone other than those in my pack. I almost heard Galen in the back of my mind, telling me if you wanted to have friends, you needed to be friendly.
I pointed to a tall shrub. "I think that's sage," I said, happy to have recognized something.
"It's an old bush," she said. "I think Dara planted it years ago."
"And that's Rosemary."
"You have a good eye for this stuff," she said approvingly. "It took me years to learn the differences between plants."
I shrugged, almost too happy for the compliment. "I used to like to cook. I recognize the leaves. What did you do before you came here?"
It must have been too direct a question, and I'd bungled it badly. She cocked her head at me, taking in my full five foot eleven inches of height and making whatever assumptions I knew people always made about me on first blush. Long, silver hair, fine features, I knew she would assume what most people did about me when they first met me. Long, freakishly blond hair and fine features would give them the impression that I was weak and shallow: a princess. They would imagine that I was used to being taken care of.
I gave her back equal study, keeping it carefully nonthreatening, knowing that as we stood there she was adding a few other things up in her mind. I was pretty and fragile looking. Her own history – being here with Dara – might also mean that she was putting an extra bit of baggage on my back that didn't belong there. Beaten and bruised, she would assume that I was wounded and weak as well.
"It's not what you think," I said, watching that black eyed gaze flick from my toes to my forehead.
"What do you think I think?"
"That I've run away because I have nowhere else to turn."
"Haven't you?" She cocked her head up at me as she put the flats of her fingers against the swell of her hip. "It's why everyone comes here. But just because we've had to run away from our packs, doesn't mean we're weak."
It was a deliberate comment, and I knew it. She was giving me what she recognized I wanted without offering any real information.
I nodded, acknowledging it. "I didn't say you were weak."
She pursed her lips with a half smile. "You didn't have to."
She turned away and squatted back down into the garden. She ran her hands beneath the plants, scooping out wayward weeds and throwing them behind her. I took a few steps and stooped over, scooping the limp stems into my hand. I'd offended her somehow and I didn't know how to take it back. I stood there, awkward and uncertain, feeling the way the breeze lifted my hair and moved the tops of the plants.
She peered up at me over her shoulder. "We had no choices but to leave our packs. The survivors leave packs like that. The weak stay."
I thought about that. Yes. Survival had a strength all is own. I thought for one brief moment that Dara had been right. I didn't even need a day to realize that it wasn't enough.
I worked with Rena for hours, and by then I had found a comfortable rhythm with the woman. After the initial awkwardness, I discovered Rena was quite pleasant. She didn't talk about her past and I didn't talk about mine, but working together in unison to clear the garden of weeds, we gathered that we were kindred spirits of a sort. Working together side by side put us with reaching hand and grappling fingers, into a natural rhythm. I helped her transplant a leggy sage growing underneath the shade of an overreaching pine bough and moved it into the sun where it could be harvested and utilized and grow healthy and lush.
It was hours before Dara found us, and when she did, I was smiling to myself as I realized I had used long-forgotten muscles and that now each movement seemed to send a bone-deep ache into my tissues. A good ache. A welcome one. I peered up at the elderly she-wolf as I sat back on my haunches, pleased with my work and happy to have the break. I felt refreshed and ready. My mind was clear. I had the feeling that was what Dara had meant when she said I needed to recover.
"I packed for you," Dara said, and in light of the pleasure I had been feeling, the news was like a wash of cold water.
I looked down at my watch. "Is it that time?"
She said nothing, but there was a strange glint in her eye.
I was stronger, I felt it. Knowing that I hadn't given much thought to my pack and my brothers for at least a day, not only surprised me, but made me feel guilty. I should have been agonizing about Luca and Lynden. Even so, I knew I was ready. I had needed to clear the cobwebs in my mind that had been threaded onto my psyche by my own self-doubt and Caleb's treachery. The work of clearing away weeds had been very like clearing away those webs. I thought of the threads of gossamer stretching across my father's escape stairs and I stiffened my back.
Dara took note of the movement and misinterpreted it as a bracing gesture.
"There's always a place for you here. If you need it," she said.
I sighed, thinking about all the women who would have loved to hear those words, feeling a sort of kinship with them for a brief second. Except I was different. I didn't need to keep running. I needed to fight back. "Thank you," I said and pushed myself to my feet, wiping the dirt from my knees. "But I don't need it anymore."
I looked askance at the woman that I might have calle
d a friend if I had been able to give a few more days work to the task. The bruises on Rena's arms were green and yellow, a sign that she had suffered some sort of abuse recently.
I couldn't not ask. "You never did tell me why you wouldn't have shifted to heal those wounds."
"Why would I want them to disappear so easily? These are badges of honour earned over a lifetime."
I gave the woman careful study. No wilting flower, this one. A warrior of sorts in her own right, and yet I'd known no female assassin like myself for any other pack within a hundred miles. I couldn't stop myself from asking.
"How many packs have hurt their she-wolves this way? There can't be that many within a hundred miles. Two, even." I mentally counted up the women I'd seen.
Dara sighed. "They come from all over. A dozen. Maybe a bakers dozen."
"A dozen?" I bit back the indignation. So many packs letting their members be abused. It was revolting. My father would never have let that happen. It made my own beast furious.
"And how often do the mates come looking?" I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.
"Plenty. But the women have long gone by then. This is just one stop along the way."
I took note of Rena's bruises. "And if the women are still here?"
Rena shifted from one foot to the other. "It gets pretty damn violent."
Meaning blood gets shed by wolves who were used to leaking it. I looked around the yard, taking in the garden and the few women who were obviously had a lot in common with the likes me: grateful for a stop to heal and then be on the run again. I had one difference. I wasn't running anymore.
"It's time for me to go," I said and I didn't need to see if either of them would protest. I knew they wouldn't. They were used to shifters running.
No Rage for You
Caleb's cronies found me half an hour from Dara's and they swept the forest around me like ants at a picnic. I noticed the first of them when I stepped over a fallen log and nearly caught my toe on a hidden branch. I'd cursed out loud and heard a strange muffling sound to my right. The birds had gone still. That should have clued me in, except I hadn't been expecting them so soon or so close. A small black wolf slinked toward me through a gap in the shrubbery, followed by a larger, shaggy wolf with a brown ruff. I halted and heeled off my sneakers, simultaneously peeling off my tank top. I'd been a fool. I had let my guard down.
Rogue Huntress: a new adult urban fantasy novel (Rogue Huntress Chronicles Book 1) Page 10
