Then Becca darted around the other woman, ignoring her startled gasp. Hopefully, Gladys would realize what she was doing and let Molly know that Becca was following a trail. There wasn’t any time to lose.
It took a moment, then she heard the quick crackle of the walkie-talkie behind her. The Pack is strong. They will follow, she thought with what might have been relief had she been thinking with just her human brain. The scent trail went down and around rocks and hummocks, following the road around until it suddenly disappeared. Becca sniffed frantically. What was the point of being a werewolf if she didn’t have a supernatural sense of smell?
Molly and Mrs. Hui appeared on the road behind her, their movements even quieter than Gladys’. It reminded Becca that she had no way to warn any of them about Anderson, not without changing back anyway. If she changed back, she might not be able to shift again, and the scent would be lost.
In a moment, the decision was made: Shelly was the first priority. Hopefully, Gladys and the others were being very careful. She circled the spot where the scents of man and metal seemed to disappear, each ring wider than the last.
Then she picked the trail up again on the other side of some rocks. With a quick glance back at the other Pack members, she began following it and they followed her. There was a large rock outcropping on the edge of the clearing and the trail led straight to it.
Then a quiet hiss from Molly stopped her in her tracks. There was a movement from the rocks ahead of them. She’d been so preoccupied with the scents that she hadn’t noticed García keeping watch. He hadn’t seen them yet, fortunately, or he’d have been firing at them.
Becca melted into the tall grass. When she looked back, Molly and Mrs. Hui were nowhere to be seen. She could smell and hear them though, and she knew they would make their own way across. She circled the clearing, hiding carefully in the Nester’s blind spot.
Part of her brain wondered where they’d hidden her car and the white van. That got clearer when she got closer to the rocks: her car was covered in brush and parked off to the side. The white van was nowhere to be seen, but there were tire tracks going up a trail that had not been visible from the road.
Becca wanted to howl her joy. She had found them and now she would be able to strike back and save Shelly. She forced herself to look for García before she leapt up the trail at full wolf speed, dashing past the outcrop and into the trees on the other side. From behind her, she heard a startled curse and the click of a gun, followed by the dull sound of something or someone being hit with something. Hard. There was a sharp scent of blood on the air now, almost enough to make her turn back. But that wasn’t what she wanted, not now.
She could smell something else on the breeze, too: wolf. Sick, trapped wolf, but one of her Pack, her alpha; she shot up the trail looking for Shelly. Oya stepped out of the trees in front of her, a gun in her hand but not looking in Becca’s direction. Without stopping to think, Becca charged into her, knocking the Nester leader down. The Nester’s rifle went flying too, and Becca pounced on it.
For an instant, she was torn between attacking Oya and finding Shelly; there would be no time to do both. Oya had rolled over and was yelling into her radio now. Becca kept running, dragging the gun in her jaws until she thought it was far enough away from Oya to drop it.
Ahead of her the white van glowed through the trees. There were two humans starting a campfire next to it, another human doing something with human food nearby. And a kneeling figure that seemed to be sitting perfectly still and watching them. A familiar scent washed over Becca and she nearly yelped with joy.
She forced the greeting back down into her throat, instead concentrating on using her momentum to swing off the trail and into the woods. Branches crackled beneath her paws before she could force herself to slow down and check for the Nesters. What if Molly and Mrs. Hui hadn’t found Oya? She’d be here in a few minutes unless something stopped her. Act now, act now: the thought was a drumbeat keeping pace with the pounding of Becca’s heart.
There was a yell from the road, back near where she had left Oya, and one of the humans next to the van got up with a curse. He walked down the road a few steps, then a couple more. Becca watched him, waiting for him to move out of sight of the others. Once he did, he was hers.
Bloodlust filled her then, driving away all conscious thought as she stalked her prey. The man was suspicious though, clearly alerted by the distant sound. His head swung from side to side and he turned, watching the woods around him. Becca’s lip curled in a snarl. She would find him no matter what he did to protect himself.
She slid around him using the brush as cover. Another noise from down the road drove him forward a couple of steps. Becca struck in a whirl of teeth and claws, dragging him from the road before he had time to fire his gun. He flailed and went still as her teeth found his throat. Blood welled between her fangs as she bit down.
“Stop it.” The voice came from somewhere behind her, its tone carrying the full weight of an alpha command.
But not her alpha. Becca spun around with a snarl, releasing the Nester in a bloody but still breathing heap. Erin stood there, her face expressionless. Her hands, fingers clenching, had not changed but her eyes gleamed silver. Becca backed off several paces, her throat still covered.
They stared at each other until Erin gestured her head slightly toward the white van, still visible through the trees. She knelt and took the Nester’s gun before stepping carefully away through the trees. She didn’t look back to see if Becca was following her.
It took a moment, a long moment of licking blood from her fangs, of imagining what it would be like to taste more before she was ready to leave the Nester. But finally Becca got up and went after Erin, shadowing her strides. She could hear more yelling from the road, then smell burning metal as a gun was fired.
Erin ducked behind a tree, then darted cautiously around it and ran toward the white van, her body bent nearly double to make herself a smaller target. Becca tore past her, nearly oblivious to the threat of the guns. Shelly’s scent filled the air, calling her, driving her forward.
A moment later and Erin was running after her. Becca hit the group of Nesters around the van at full force, knocking Leroy down with a single blow. She jumped clear of him as one of the other Nesters fired at her, turning to lunge at him, snarling. He blocked her with the butt of his rifle, trying to push her into easier firing range, and she hit the ground with a yelp. Then she spun back and came at him from another direction, faster than any real wolf could have.
There were more shots all around her. The taste of blood on her fangs seemed to be casting a red haze over everything, clouding everything but the prey she wanted. She jumped, she struck, was struck in return. There was a chorus of human voices: shouting, moaning, cursing, making the clearing a cacophony.
Then there was a silence that fell so suddenly they all froze, Pack and Nesters alike. “I think that’s enough.” Shelly was standing next to Erin and each of them held a gun. Erin was just lowering hers, after firing the shot that caught everyone’s attention. Shelly looked at Becca, “See if you can change back, hon. We’ll need you for wrapping this up.”
It took Becca a few moments to realize that her alpha was speaking to her now. She had orders, a direction, something she was supposed to do. The feeling made her go limp with relief, roiling rage dissipating into the earth beneath her paws.
She looked down and tried to remember what the feeble human inside her saw when she looked at her paws. Her wolf brain strained to remember; this was what she was supposed to do. She remembered walking on two legs, remembered her fur disappearing, remembered the pain of transformation. If she tried very hard, she could almost remember what it felt like to be that human. Almost.
What she couldn’t seem to do was to become that other self.
Becca Thornton stood on her back legs, held out not quite human paws to her alpha and whimpered.
Chapter 28
~
“What a
re we going to do with her?” Molly gave Becca a sidelong glance. “Is she going to be stuck like this?”
Becca thought about biting her. But that seemed like too much effort. Instead, she crouched in front of the back doors of the white van, rocking back and forth as she listened to the Nesters locked inside. They didn’t sound very happy and that small satisfaction made her loll her tongue out of her mouth in a panting grin. Until she realized that she was doing it.
Then she hung her head, misery hanging off her like the clothes she was afraid that she might never wear again. Someone stepped up next to her and rested a quiet hand on her shoulder. She could smell Erin’s concern, mixed with a little fear, as she stood there. “It’s just that they’ve messed with your metabolism or something, Becca. We’ll get you some help and get it out of your system. Everything will go back to normal. You’ll see.”
Erin’s fingers stroked Becca’s fur, the feeling disturbing and soothing at the same time. Human thoughts and perceptions came and went, mingling with the wolf in her brain until she wasn’t sure what she felt. Part of her wanted to rip the doors off the van and make the Nesters pay for everything she was going through. The rest of her just wanted to be human again, or at least something closer to it. She felt like a bad special effect.
Shelly walked up, stopping a couple of feet away. “Do you think you can get her to Dr. Green’s, Erin? Then meet us back up at the new location?” She spoke softly, like she didn’t want the Nesters to hear anything from their metal prison.
New location? Becca tried to understand what that might mean. The Women’s Club was long gone. They wouldn’t be meeting at Shelly’s house, not talking about it that way. Where else was there? A memory of old magic, of paintings and wolves and a need to change too unbearable to be ignored, washed over her. The cave! Wolf and human united inside her for a single purpose. That was where she might find peace.
But Erin was herding her toward a pickup truck, nudging her gently away from the others and the van. Gladys and Mrs. Hui were getting into the van and preparing to drive it away. Shelly and Molly and some of the other Pack members were headed down the road toward some of the other cars. This isn’t right. The thought shot through her as if it had started in the ground under her paws and grown up through her like a vine.
She understood what she needed to do as if someone had shouted it into her ear. As the realization struck home, she took off running into the woods at top speed, ignoring Erin’s shouts from behind her. She tore uphill as fast as she could, loping along on two legs, then four, as the terrain permitted it. The trees sped by in a blur as she clambered over rocks and splashed through streams. The magic was calling her now and she could follow it straight home.
The world slipped slowly into dusk as she ran, but the darkness didn’t impact her hybrid wolf sight the way it had right after the injection. Her sense of smell seemed weaker though, and the human camp that she nearly stumbled into made her freeze into the shadows. Then she forced herself to breath in the scents of people and think about them as something other than prey. These were familiar smells: Wolf’s Point people then, not outsiders. Her people, almost like Pack.
The knowledge that they were under Pack protection was enough to send her on her way. She slipped around them through the trees, treading light and moving almost too swiftly for any eye to catch. Then there was another crest beyond that, then more trees. She could see the mountain above the cave up ahead of her now. Her stomach grumbled with hunger now, the quick drinks she had taken from the streams she had crossed doing nothing to fill the emptiness.
But there wasn’t time to hunt. She needed to be at the cave while the moon was still in the sky. Every instinct told her so. She kept running, hoping that prey would find her on the way.
She was stumbling a little when she finally reached the path to the cave. The moon hung over the trees when she got there, its not quite round shape hanging in the upper branches. She paused to looked up at it, a tiny howl failing at her parched and hungry lips. Then she scrambled on the loose rocks alongside the path as she forced her weary body upwards.
“What the hell?” The human voice was loud and sharp from the ledge just above her. Becca looked up and into the barrel of Lizzie’s gun. The deputy was swearing in what sounded like two languages, one of which Becca didn’t recognize. She paused, torn between an urge to flee and her desperate desire to get to the cave.
Maybe she could tell the deputy who she was. She opened her mouth and choked out a strangled, unintelligible sound. She coughed her way around it, like it was a furball or something, trying to make it sound human. Lizzie’s gun didn’t waver. Instead she called over her shoulder into the cave, “Hey, Shelly. I think Becca’s here but I’m not sure. Can you come out and verify that it’s her?”
Becca leaned against the rocks, letting the exhaustion catch up with her. Her hand was bleeding and she licked at it, miserably. It took a moment to realize that she was licking skin, not fur. She reached up to touch her face just as Shelly appeared above her on the ledge. “Becca, come on up here.”
She reached down and Becca took her hand. Between them, Shelly and Lizzie pulled her up the last few feet. Becca collapsed on the ground, panting. A water bottle appeared in front of her and she scrambled to open it, her hands trying to remember familiar gestures. She poured its contents down her parched throat before she even looked around.
Then she glanced up at Erin who was standing in the cave opening watching her. “Would’ve been faster to have gotten a ride with me.”
Becca shrugged, not trusting herself to speak, and touched her face again. Her jaw was still too long, too fuzzy, to be human. She still hadn’t completely changed back then. Her stomach growled again, making them all jump. “There’s jerky in my pack,” Lizzie volunteered from behind Becca.
She pulled herself up, first on four legs, then two. Then she lurched over to the small pile of packs by the entrance. What was all this stuff? She could smell all kinds of things: jerky and herbs and salt along with stuff that made no sense to her hungry brain. She ignored her questions in favor of tearing open a package of jerky and devouring it.
Erin reached down and took the pack from her as she chewed. Part of her was wondering if Erin was repulsed by the way she was eating. Becca Thornton would never have guzzled water in great slobbering gulps or clawed her way into a package of jerky like she had just done. Not under normal circumstances, anyway.
She made herself slow down and take smaller bites. She even closed her eyes and took a few deep slow breaths while she chewed. The jerky was gone far too soon, but she could feel the fierce intensity of her hunger retreat. She got back up.
Shelly was standing next to Erin and they were looking at the stuff in the packs. “Are you sure that this is what the Circle elders told you? I’m just wondering…well, hoping that there’s another answer.”
Becca’s ears pricked up. Shelly’s voice was sad and she wanted to comfort her alpha somehow. The cave was lit by torches and their light travelled out far enough to outline the new shadows under Shelly’s eyes, the silver in her hair. But Erin looked almost as worn out. She squeezed Shelly’s shoulder lightly. “You know it has to be this way. The Pack needs you.”
Something distracted Becca and she looked away from the two of them and into the cave. There was a pattern on the ground, outlined in what looked like sand. It called her, pulling her inside before she even realized that she was moving. She found herself at the edge of the pattern’s outer circle without even realizing that she’d walked toward it.
Shelly and Erin were right behind her. Shelly spoke first, “No, Becca. Don’t step into the pattern. We need it to tap into the magic of the valley.”
Erin’s voice overlapped hers. “Hey, she’s changing back. Becca, hon, you with us again?”
Becca reached up and touched her face again. Everything felt normal, at least for her daytime self. Her cheekbones seemed to be popping through her skin though; she wondered if she looked a
s haggard as Shelly and Erin did to her. But then, it had been a rough week
She glanced from the pattern at her feet to Shelly. The Pack alpha sighed. “I guess we need to get you caught up. We couldn’t find all the Nesters and Sara…Oya got away. We think they still have their lab and their so-called cure and we’re down a few folks who got wounded.” Shelly grimaced, her anger glowing across her features for a moment. “And if they can get their cure into the town’s water supply or something along those lines, we’re not sure what’ll happen next…”
Erin picked up where she left off. “I spoke with the elders and this is what they thought would work to use the magic of the valley and stop the Nesters once and for all.” She gave Shelly a quick glance, “They weren’t too sure what was going to happen at the end of the ritual though, so I’m going to be the one to try it.”
Becca frowned, “That sounds dangerous.” Her voice came out as a croak but at least the sounds were making sense now. At the moment, though, that felt like the least of her worries. What would she do if something happened to Erin? Fear twisted its way through her gut when no one contradicted her.
Shelly looked like she’d aged a decade in the last minute. She looked at the pattern and didn’t meet Becca’s eyes. “She may not be Erin afterwards.”
“Hey, maybe I won’t survive it at all. Let’s try and be optimistic here,” Erin grinned, her smile a shadow of its former self.
“What do you mean?” Becca felt like throwing up. Or screaming and running through the place extinguishing the torches or anything else that might stop this craziness. This kind of news called for something more than just standing here, but for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out where to start.
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