by Молли Харпер
“But that’s crazy.”
He shrugged. “That’s life in the pack. Maggie serves as second to a guy named Eli. He’s running things now.”
“I’m sorry.”
He pulled me close, tucking his chin on top of my head. “There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“Industrial-grade sedatives for your sister sound like a good place to start.”
He snorted. I pressed my face into his throat. I didn’t want to look up at him for what I was going to ask next.
“So, on to more recent history. I get why you pretended not to know me when we were introduced at the saloon. I mean, what were you supposed to say, ‘Hey, I remember you from bringing down an elk right outside your door’? But after the . . . after I was attacked, why did you act like you didn’t know what happened? You were there. You saw. And you still acted like . . .”
“A complete ass,” he said, cupping my face so I met his gaze. “The first time I saw you, I thought I’d dreamed you up. I couldn’t tell whether it was a real dream or something I’d seen as a wolf. I used to do sweeps by your house at night. At first, I think it was just because you had all those animals tromping through your yard and the hunting was good. I remembered little things, like picking up your scent near the house and feeling warm, calm. I wanted to flop down on the porch and sleep. I couldn’t seem to stop myself from coming back over and over. I’m used to the compulsive, instinctual side of my nature, but it was still confusing, that primal part of my brain leading me here every night, just to be near you. It was stronger even than my instinct to return home to my pack. It was such a relief to have one trump the other, like my ears had been ringing for years and suddenly stopped. I was able to sleep, really sleep, for the first time since I left home. As I saw you more and more in my wolf form, I realized I always remembered you the next morning. Your face, your scent, the sound of your voice—they follow me back into my human form. You’re my constant. You don’t fade away.”
“But why were you so horrible to me, even after the alley?”
“Because I hadn’t figured it out yet. I couldn’t tell the difference between real dreams and wolf dreams yet. And when you . . . when you were attacked, the look on your face, the pain and the fear, that stuck with me. Every time I closed my eyes, your face was hovering there. It was torture. I resented you for it and for the pull you had over me.”
“That’s it? That’s the reason you’ve been a jerk ever since I moved up here? Because I confused your wolf brain?”
“No. For the last couple of years, I’ve been a miserable bastard to everybody, except for Evie and Buzz. It made things easier for me, not having friends, not having connections that could drag me down, make me responsible to anyone. You’re just the first person to call me on it. Repeatedly.”
“So, you’re saying that if Walt or Leonard called you an asshole to your face, you’d be eating post-coital pasta with one of them right now?”
“Let’s not even joke about that,” he said, shuddering. “The funny thing was, even after I wanted to stop being so rude to you all the time, I couldn’t. I would want to be friendly, but then I’d open my mouth, and all hell would break loose.”
“And the fact that Alan happened to be talking to me during those moments—provoking your territorial, alpha-male tendencies—would have nothing to do with your inability to be civil?”
“I thought you were sleepy,” he grumbled.
“I have my lucid moments.”
CHAPTER 13
The Ties That Are Binding
I DREAMED OF HOME, of the hammock in my parents’ yard, strung between two peach trees. I felt the warm sun saturating my skin, heard the droning of the bees. My father strung little bits of “sculpture” in the branches when I was a kid—mirrors, little metal bits that Dad seemed to think would help the birds nest. In reality, it just confused the heck out of the birds, but the shiny pieces were pretty to look at when you were stretched out under that fragrant green canopy.
I closed my eyes, and the scene changed. I was with Kara on the beach. It must have been on one of the many spring-break vacations in which her family had included me. The turquoise waters of the Gulf of Mexico lapped at our toes as we read Christopher Pike paperbacks and watched for cute boys.
“He’s good for you, you know,” Kara said in her old-sage voice. When we were kids, she’d considered the six months she had on me to be a lifetime of experience. As this dream seemed to be set in late high school or early college, she could have been talking about any number of “he’s.” And I found I didn’t really care, I just wanted this warm, familiar moment to last.
“You’ve said that about all of my boyfriends,” I reminded her, scrunching my toes into the cool, damp sand as I tipped my head back into the sunshine.
“He’s going to be the love of your life.”
“You’ve said that about all of my boyfriends, too, Kare,” I said. I reached out to pat her arm as I adjusted my Ray-Bans.
“You know, you’re home now, right?” she asked. “No matter what happens, that’s your home.”
I opened my eyes to find us in the parking lot of the Tast-E-Grill, sitting in my old Chevy, which we lovingly called the Rust Bucket. We were eating chili dogs and Tater Tots, with our bare feet propped on the cracked faux-leather dashboard.
This was such a weird dream.
“You’re home now,” Kara repeated.
“I’m confused.”
“You’ve been a girl without a home for a long time, Mo. It’s time to stop looking. You know where you’re supposed to be. When trouble comes, you’re going to stick. You always have, you always will,” she said, eyeing my Tots. “Are you going to finish those?”
I blinked awake, and I swear I could still smell the car exhaust and the chili dogs. Cooper stirred beside me, his arm tightening instinctually around me as he felt me sit up. I pressed a kiss to his shoulder and flopped my head back onto my pillow.
It didn’t surprise me, as it had on occasion, to wake up with a large, naked werewolf curled around my body. These days, we were together morning, noon, and night. Naked Cooper Time was like a drug. No matter how much I got, I ended up jonesing for more. Winter was passing, and I hardly noticed. Don’t get me wrong, it was cold, so cold that I occasionally feared losing outlying areas of my body just from walking to and from my truck. There were days when the roads were impassable, even with four-wheel drive, as drifts of snow reaching over my head piled in some lanes. Buzz would have to come pick me up for work on his snowmobile, and I would make minuscule batches of food for the handful of people willing to brave the roads so they could gather around the big iron stove in the dining room and avoid their own cooking.
There were afternoons when the darkness closed in on me like a smothering blanket and the wind howled like some horrible, rabid thing. The light, or absence thereof, controlled what I did, where I went, when I ate. But the claustrophobia and depression I’d expected never really set in. It’s not difficult to spend days at a time trapped inside when you’ve got a warm fire, good food, and generally nude company. It was like a prolonged snow day. The one time I’d gotten a snow day in my brief tango with public school was when we had a freak ice storm my junior year. Hail isn’t that much fun to sled on.
Christmas came and went. I counted my blessings that my parents didn’t care enough about Christian holidays centered on meat consumption to call and guilt me into coming home. Abner came to the saloon dressed as Santa and gave everybody bottles of his homemade vodka. Cooper said it made a handy antiseptic, but drinking it was taking your life into your own hands.
Cooper didn’t mention going home to see his family, so I prepared a low-key feast for him, Buzz, and Evie. I wasn’t sure what a girl should buy her werewolf boyfriend, so I stuck with something safe: a sweater. Mind-numbingly boring, I know. Cooper made me a little carved wooden wolf, which we promptly put on my mantel to watch over me when he wasn’t there. It was either endearing or a little cre
epy.
My favorite werewolf seemed to have moved into my house without my noticing. His T-shirts started showing up in my closet. His toothbrush was next to mine on the sink. He showed up with bags of groceries to replace the mountains of food he consumed. We didn’t talk about it. It just was. Normally, this sort of invasion of privacy, the blurring of boundaries, would have me panicking. But I wanted him nearby. I had difficulty remembering what it was like not having him in my home, in my bed, nipping and nuzzling and rolling all over each other until his scent seemed absorbed into my pores.
The exceptions to our constant togetherness were the guiding jobs he took and the nights he was a wolf. He could choose not to change, but staying human for too long made him antsy. Besides, he said it was good for other predators to sense him prowling around the house. And it made the nights he was home that much sweeter. I knew what I was missing when he was gone. And it wasn’t just the sex . . . It was home, what home was supposed to be, someone to eat with, to talk to, to sleep with, always touching, always connected, as if we were afraid that when one of us woke up, the other would disappear like a dream.
We didn’t talk about Susie, unless it was in relation to Oscar. And he tended to clam up whenever I asked Alan for updates on the missing hikers, so I stopped talking about them in front of him. While Cooper insisted that it was probably just a sick or injured wolf, the probability that a plain old run-of-the-mill wolf was attacking people seemed to be shrinking.
Few of our neighbors remarked on our sudden couplehood, probably because Cooper growled if they did. Responses were limited to smirks and snickers. And Abner assured me that he would wait for me until I realized I needed someone with more experience. While Nate seemed somewhat surprised by my choice of Cooper, he said he just wanted me to be happy in Grundy, which was the equivalent of his blessing. Then he mentioned something about finding a girl for Alan on the Internet, which just made me feel horrible.
For his part, Alan had trouble keeping up a gracious front. I couldn’t say I blamed him. I pulled him aside at the saloon and tried to tell him about Cooper, but he cut me off. He understood, he said, but he couldn’t help feeling as if something special had been yanked out from under him.
“I’ll settle for being your friend, Mo,” he said, his eyes tight and unhappy. “But if Cooper ever drops the ball, all bets are off. I’m gonna sweep you off your feet before you know what hit you.”
I could only assume that I was the ball in this scenario.
Alan’s manner never changed with me. He was just as open and friendly as ever. But he rarely spoke to or about Cooper, especially if I was around.
I blinked again, hoping to get my eyes to adjust to the darkened bedroom. I patted the nightstand until I found my glasses so I could see the alarm clock. It was only 12:20, but it felt as if it should be morning already. With the sun setting so early, my internal clock was ticking out of balance. I sat up, wondering if baking at this hour would be considered workaholism.
Obviously, this dream of Kara was my subconscious reminding me that I was neglecting the people not currently in my bed. The only contact I’d had with Kara over the last few weeks was with pictures I’d sent her of the first measurable snow. I’d had Cooper photograph me standing in a waist-deep drift, grinning like a fool. She immediately started making plans to visit me at the spring thaw. I think that was based more on the pictures she saw of Cooper than on an overwhelming desire to see me. The subject line of her response e-mail was “Do they all look like that?”
“You all right?” Cooper asked, reaching to stroke a hand down my bare shoulder. He nudged the ridges of my spine with his nose, inhaling deeply and nipping at my neck.
“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “Weird dream about the beach . . . and chili dogs.”
Cooper yawned, drawing me close. “Well, I’m no expert, but that sounds like a Freudian field day.”
“Yes, because I’m so sexually deprived,” I retorted.
Suddenly, Cooper’s ears perked up. He leaped out of bed, landing soundlessly on his feet and dashing to the front window. His eyes scanned the yard, and he grimaced.
“Cooper?”
“Wait here. Lock up behind me,” he told me, phasing as he opened the door. “Don’t come out until I call for you.”
I bolted the door, scrambling back into my bedroom for jeans and a shirt. I could hear deep, staccato barks outside. It sounded like a greeting or a warning or possibly a combination of both. I pulled back the curtain and tried to make out shapes in the dark front yard as I slipped my bare feet into a pair of Cooper’s boots. All I could see was the outline of Cooper’s wolf form just beyond the porch, at full attention, the fur on his back standing straight up. An answering series of barks sounded from the woods, and Cooper was off the porch in a flash. Just inside the tree line, I could see a huge reddish-brown wolf, almost a head and a half taller than Cooper’s own furry form, lumber into view. Cooper lunged at the strange wolf in a sort of canine tackle, latching on to the fur near the red wolf’s tail. The red wolf snapped its teeth around Cooper’s front leg, sweeping Cooper off his paws and pinning him to the ground. They rolled in the snow, barking and biting. I fumbled through the contents of my purse for the bear mace and ran outside.
“Cooper, get away!” I shouted, flipping the cap off the bear mace and preparing to spray the strange wolf as soon as Cooper was clear. I took a swinging kick at the red wolf’s side. “Get the hell off of him, you big, furry motherfu—” The wolf dodged at the last minute, and the toe of my boot just barely caught its rib cage. The strange wolf yelped. I pressed the trigger, and a long stream of chemical spray came shooting out of the canister, right into the wolf’s eyes. I coughed as traces of the burning liquid roiled through the air. Cooper rolled away and phased onto his very human feet. He knocked the mace canister out of my hand.
“What are you doing?”
“He was hurting you!” I cried. “I was trying to help.”
“I wasn’t hurt,” he insisted. “That’s just how we say hello.”
“What?”
Behind me, a loud, gruff voice boomed. “Ahh! What the hell did you spray me with?”
Cooper ran toward the house. I turned to see a large naked man standing in my yard. You’d think at this point I’d be used to it, but no, not so much. The stranger was built like a professional wrestler, gone slightly soft around the middle. Huge biceps, a broad chest, thigh muscles the size of my head. His dark hair, which had a slight auburn tint to it, fell stick-straight into his eyes. Or it would have, if his eyes hadn’t been clenched shut against the burn of bear mace.
Cooper came jogging back with my hose in his hands. Apparently, he’d run into the utility room to grab it and had hooked it up to the heavily insulated outside spigot. “Come on, Sam. It will feel better in a few minutes.”
“She fucking maced me, Coop!”
I gasped. “I am so sorry. I thought you were a real wolf, not a werewolf. I thought you were hurting Cooper and—”
“You came running to rescue me from the big, bad wolf,” Cooper said sternly as a shivering, cursing Samson held his head under the running hose. “Despite the fact that I told you to stay in the house.”
“Oh, yes, because I’m so good at following directions. That should be no surprise to you,” I snapped back.
Samson straightened, blinking owlishly. The angry red color seemed to be fading from his skin and eyes. “If I didn’t heal so quickly, I’d be wicked pissed about this, cuz.”
“Mo, this is my idiot cousin Samson. Samson, this is Mo.”
Samson seemed distracted for the moment from whatever errand had brought him to our door . . . and burning agony. He smirked at me. “I wondered why Coop’s scent was so faint at his place but reeks out here. Now I see why. Of course, I could be going blind, so who knows?”
“I’m so sorry.” I carefully extended my hand, keeping my eyes trained on Samson’s. But some bizarre eye twitch kept leading my line of sight southward
. Through the haze of embarrassment, I wondered if the heroic proportions in Cooper’s family were a hereditary thing or a wolf thing. “Um, would you like to come inside?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t have time. Cooper, your mom sent me for you. It’s Pops. They think he’s had a heart attack or a stroke or something.”
“What?” Cooper sat heavily on the ground, the wind and the color clearly knocked out of him.
“Dr. Moder said he didn’t have an ‘acute episode.’ He just seemed disoriented for a little bit, couldn’t remember who we were or where he was. He’s stable for right now, but he needs an EKG and a bunch of tests. He won’t let us move him from the village clinic. The doc says she’ll stay with him the whole time and cover up any questions, but he’s afraid people at the hospital will be able to tell he’s a wolf. Your mom thinks maybe if you told him to go, he would go. We tried calling, but you didn’t pick up at home. And you always ignore our voice mails.”
Cooper shook his head. “Me being there, it’s just going to stir things up, stress him out, make him worse.”
“How could you say that?” Samson demanded. “I figured all I would have to tell you was ‘Pops is sick,’ and you’d come running. I never thought I’d have to talk you into going, even if you haven’t been back in years. It’s bad, Cooper. I’ve never seen him like this. You need to be there. I don’t give a shit what Maggie has to say about it! You’re going, even if I have to drag you back myself.” Cooper shot him a dark, meaningful look. Samson grinned and looked chastened. “Well, I would try.”
