Changeling Dawn

by Dani Harper

  “Nate! For pity’s sake, you know better than that. We’ve been through all this before, again and again. We’re friends and that’s all there is.”

  “Well it’s not enough for me. Maybe I don’t want to be friends either.”

  She goggled at him. “Are you blowing me off? That’s so high school!”

  “Isn’t that just what you’re doing with me?” He walked a few steps away and pinched the bridge of his nose as if he had a headache. When he turned toward her, his expression was grim. “I want it all, baby. I don’t need a goddamn friendship—I got plenty of pals to hang out with. I want you to be with me all the way.”

  “Nate, I—”

  He held up a hand. “Think it over. Just think it over. I’ll be back this way in a few days and maybe you’ll have come to your senses by then.” He headed down to the twin ruts that passed for a road, rammed a flashy yellow Humvee into gear and drove off in a cloud of dust.

  Crap, crap, crap. She kicked over her camp chair, then worked on sending each and every piece of her firewood pile flying. It didn’t help much—she wanted to punch something. Hell, she wanted to bite something. Nate’s arrival had been surprise enough, but his demands for a relationship had blindsided her completely. Where the hell had that come from?

  She racked her brain, trying to think of what had been said, done, implied, or even hinted at during their last conversation. But that was two years ago. Two years! She’d congratulated Nate when he took over the archaeology department at NYU. They’d danced together, but only twice—she’d had a date with him, for heaven’s sake. And in the past two years she hadn’t even sent Nate a damn e-mail. Thought about it once or twice, but hadn’t gotten around to it. Kenzie threw up her hands. How could anything she had done or said have led him to persist in hoping for a relationship with her?

  And that other thing he’d said—it wasn’t safe for Changelings to be alone. What the hell did he mean by that? If he was so worried about her, why wait two years to come and talk to her about it?

  Men! She filled a water bottle, swore as it overflowed, and stomped back to her dig. It had never been safe for Changelings, alone or with a mate. But she hoped with all her might that what she was doing would change that.

  Chapter Three

  Stupid rabbit.

  Anya sat down hard, her sides heaving and pink tongue lolling full length to help cool her furred body. She was fast in wolfen form, not as fast as she would be when she grew up, but a lot faster than she was on two feet. Not quick enough to catch the big snowshoe hare, however. She had been lucky to spot it despite its earth-brown summer coat, but it had dodged her first lunge easily, and continued to keep distance between them no matter how hard she tried. Finally it disappeared into the underbrush with a flick of its tail.

  You probably taste stupid too.

  Two days ago she’d caught a mouse, but that had been luck. She’d blundered on it by accident and had a paw on it almost before she’d realized what it was. If she had been on two legs, the thought of mousemeat would have been icky. As a wolf, however, the musty-smelling little ball of fur had tasted just fine. It had eased the hunger a little but not for long. Her mother could hunt—she’d often brought home a deer, and deer were sooooo yummy—but Anya hadn’t learned how yet; she wasn’t big enough. She wished and wished her mother was here with her. The men had hurt her, taken her somewhere ... but where? She’d told Anya to run; she hadn’t told her what to do next.

  Anya wished she could Change back, but she didn’t dare. She missed her bed with its pink fuzzy pillows. She could spread the blankets on it (almost straight) so she wouldn’t be cold, and she knew how to make cereal with milk so she wouldn’t be hungry. But she couldn’t go home and besides, she didn’t know where home was anymore. She didn’t know where here was either. The forest had always been so beautiful with its sounds and smells, but now there was way too much of it.

  Hungry, tired, and more lonely than she had ever been, even lonelier than when her best friend Sasha had moved away, she flopped down and rested her chin on her paws. She was almost asleep when her sensitive nostrils caught a faint scent from somewhere downwind. It wasn’t wolf... and it wasn’t human. It was like her. Hope dragged her to her feet and she trotted south on a narrow game trail that flanked the wide river.

  Kenzie studied the satellite map, then eyed her grid lines. She’d had to set them up all over again after a young grizzly blundered through them in the night. He probably hadn’t even noticed he was dragging several hundred feet of string festooned with fluorescent tape and dozens of wire stakes. She’d followed the broad trail for nearly a mile until she found the huge tangle wrapped around some wild rosebushes.

  The string hadn’t been salvageable, but she’d cut the stakes from the snarled mess before tossing it in her campfire pit. Luckily she had another roll. It had been one of the first things she’d learned about fieldwork, that somebody or something was likely to take out at least some of the gridlines on every dig. Her very first site had been trampled—and crapped on—by a trio of camels. At least the grizzly hadn’t left anything nasty behind.

  A flicker of movement at the far edge of the clearing caught her eye. Every sense alert, she waited. Tried to catch a scent but whatever had moved was downwind of her. She sighed and hoped it wasn’t that damn bear again. If it was, she might have to Change and chase it off.

  Nothing showed itself, but throughout the day Kenzie’s eyes strayed often to the thick forest growth beyond the dig site. Intuition told her she was being watched. The movement in the brush told her that, whatever it was, it sure wasn’t big enough to be the bear. And when daylight finally faded, making it too dark to work efficiently—long after 10 P.M. this far north—she sensed she was being followed all the way back to her camp. Still, her wolfen instincts didn’t raise any alarm. Some creature was probably just curious. A mountain lion had tracked her once, puzzled by her Changeling scent, yet Kenzie hadn’t been afraid. No animal in its right mind would attack her, not even the grizzly. The only creatures she had to be wary of were human beings.

  Strings of tiny solar lights were glowing prettily around the perimeter of her camp when she arrived. She got her Coleman stove going, boiled water, and added it to a pouch of instant stew. It smelled, well, reasonable. The quality of camp food had certainly improved over the years but it was never going to smell good to her. Wasn’t going to taste good either, but that was the price of convenience. The foil bag was too darn hot to hold in her hands, however, so she poured it into a bowl. Just as she turned to find a spoon, she spotted movement at the far edge of her camp. The solar lights were strictly for ambience, not illumination, but it didn’t matter. As a Changeling, Kenzie’s night vision was acute. She watched as a small black nose eased out from under a bush. The nose was followed by a dark blunt muzzle, a pair of eyes, and two pointed ears that looked a little too big.

  I’ll be damned. It’s a wolf cub. “Hey,” she said aloud. “Have you been following me?” The creature’s face disappeared among the leaves, but not for long. It reemerged a few minutes later, watching her intently. Eventually the face was followed by a thin body. The cub was somewhere between the fuzzy baby stage and the gangly teen phase. Its fur was dark brown tipped with black, but one front foot was oddly white almost to the elbow. Kenzie lifted a spoon to her mouth and the cub’s eyes seemed to follow the movement. She frowned. “Are you hungry? Where’s your mother?”

  It didn’t respond of course. Nor did it come any closer. Why was this cub alone? Wolves took very good care of their young, and if something happened to the alpha pair, the rest of the Pack often stepped in to care for the cubs. She ate her dinner slowly, trying not to feel guilty for eating in front of the little creature and reminding herself that people food would only upset its system anyway.

  Eventually, Kenzie reached out her fingers and made a soft call, but the cub didn’t move. She persisted only to see the cub retreat into the bushes. She wasn’t as gifted with animal
s as her brother Connor, but most creatures came to her. She waited until the moon was high yet the young wolf didn’t reappear. Hoping that the cub’s family had collected it, Kenzie finally turned in. Dawn came early here and she wanted to be at the site when daylight arrived.

  She slept fitfully. The nightmare recurred, but this time, it was Nate who chased her.

  The orange-striped canopy looked like it belonged on a beach, not in a forest clearing. Kenzie had been forced to replace her old canopy before the trip, and was dismayed not only by the color of this one, but its newness. It seemed almost vulgar, clashing with the familiar items it shaded; her battered screening box on an old blue tarp, her trowels and brushes, her camp shovel and other nicked and worn tools. Even the electronic equipment—her handheld GPS was a prime example—looked like tired and dusty flea market finds.

  “Tools are meant to be used,” she told herself, a saying she had picked up from her father, Ronan. Come to think of it, her oldest brother, James, said the same thing. It was tempting to throw a little dirt on the brilliant canopy just so it would fit in with the rest of her gear. Maybe she’d be lucky and the garish thing would fade in the sun.

  She picked up a trowel and headed for the grid. Today she would break ground in square three and the anticipation made her tingle. Not too many people got goosebumps from digging in the dirt, but Kenzie lived for this. She loved the entire process, from the moment of beginning, of possibility, to the patient brushing away of layers, the chipping of stone, the bagging of samples, to the rare and beautiful discovery of pure history. Before the trowel touched the ground, however, a movement from the forest edge caught her attention.

  The wolf cub was back.

  The great hooked beak snapped shut an inch from his face, and Josh Talarkoteen’s gloved hand snaked out to grab it. Throwing his other arm around the large feathered body, he pinned the bird’s powerful wings to its sides, praying he wasn’t causing it more pain. “There we are, shhh, easy. Easy. I’m trying to help you.”

  It was a golden eagle, larger than a bald eagle, and a female. Goldens were superb hunters and seldom scavenged carcasses as their cousins did. This one was young, however, and had been attracted to a dead deer along the side of the road where she’d been clipped by a passing car. Another motorist spotted her hopping along the ditch and called Josh’s office. Despite the bird’s broken wing, it had still taken him the better part of an hour to get close enough to her to grab her.

  “It’s going to be okay, honey. We’re going to get you fixed up and back in the sky in no time. But you’re going to have to go for a little trip first.” It was a struggle to get the big raptor into the large traveling kennel, but a short one—Josh was both strong and experienced. He’d rescued plenty of bald eagles but he’d never gotten this close to a golden, even though he’d seen them all his life in the Stikine River valley. He’d been surprised to see them soaring high above the hills in Afghanistan too. Their presence had helped center him, helped keep himself together amid the blood and violence. Once in a while a pair of golden eagles had flanked him as he flew his chopper over mountain and desert. Sometimes he pictured himself as an eagle too. Perhaps it was his Tahltan background—after all, eagles played a powerful role in clan culture, second only to wolves. Or perhaps he just plain liked to fly. Whichever it was, he felt a kinship with the extraordinary birds.

  Fierce yellow eyes studied him through the bars, eyes that could see several times better than he could. He wondered what they saw. Josh instinctively wanted to stroke the eagle’s bronze head but knew that wild creatures seldom appreciated the human gesture. To them, he was an enemy and not to be trusted. Sometimes the very young ones, cubs and fawns, were all too happy to be held and petted, but it wasn’t good for them. They needed to retain a natural suspicion of humans—that’s what would keep them alive. He patted the top of the kennel instead and strapped it down before closing the tailgate.

  He shook back his long dark hair as he swung into the truck cab. Usually it was tied back, but he’d lost the damn leather thong again. Maybe he’d cut his hair. His head had been shaved when he’d joined the service after 9/11, and in the breathless heat of Afghanistan he’d been glad of it. Five years. He’d spent five years there. Some nights he was still there....

  Suddenly his cell phone belted out Nickelback’s If Today Was Your Last Day. Josh had chosen the song with a nod to two of his buddies who hadn’t made it back.

  “Tark here.” He used his nickname from his service days without thinking.

  “Who? I’m looking for Josh Talarkoteen.”

  “You’ve got the right—Kenzie, is that you?”

  “You remembered my name?”

  Hell yeah. He’d only been thinking about her a hundred times a day, trying to come up with an excuse to see her again that wouldn’t make him seem like a stalker. “Of course I did. What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve got an orphaned wolf here that I need some help with.”

  His pleasure at having Kenzie on the other end of the phone was suddenly tempered with apprehension. Every year the Division of Wildlife Conservation was flooded with calls about abandoned animals, and most of the time, the creatures weren’t in need of help at all. It was typical of most mothers to leave their young for periods of time. A mother bear would actually run her young cubs up a tree so she could go fishing. Deer left their fawns in order to feed. As a result, Fish and Game usually ended up with far too many moose calves, fox and raccoon kits, even grizzly cubs that had been “rescued” by well-intentioned people who had no idea they were actually kidnapping the young animals.

  A wolf cub, however, was unusual. There hadn’t been a report on one of those for over three years, and the last one turned out to be a lost malamute pup. Kenzie Macleod proved to be unusual as well, giving Josh a concise assessment of the animal and its condition. He found himself nodding into the phone. “Sounds like you’ve pegged it right. The cub wouldn’t be alone this long, and it’s definitely too young to fend for itself. What’s your location?”

  And please, honey, read me the phonebook while you’re at it. Dr. Mackenzie Macleod’s voice was low and sultry despite her all-business attitude. He caught himself wondering how it sounded in the dark and yanked himself back to reality as she gave him a GPS reading. He spread out a dog-eared map and whistled as he pinpointed the locale. “I thought you said you were going to Chistochina.”

  “I said near Chistochina.”

  It was near the village like he was near the frickin’ beach. At least he knew the area. “Let’s see—I’ve got a few errands to finish up. I can probably make it there in three, maybe four hours or so.”

  Three or four hours if he didn’t spend too much time at the animal clinic and if he took the chopper. The highway in the Copper River basin was decent but any road that left it was almost guaranteed to be a rodeo for the toughest four-wheel-drive trucks, and an axle-breaker for anything less. Flying was the most practical way to get around if you were in any kind of a hurry. Most small towns, including little Chistochina, had a grass airstrip, but Dr. Macleod wasn’t anywhere near it. Studying a satellite map, Josh chose a wide spot on the nearby riverbank where he could set down—he didn’t need much. His government-issued copter was an R44 Raven. It was like flying a dragonfly compared to the big Blackhawks and Apaches he’d flown out of Baghram. A gifted pilot, Josh could land the military birds in extremely tight spaces. By comparison, the little Raven was pure play. Plus, other than a poacher once, most people didn’t shoot at him these days, and that made flying a damn sight simpler.

  It was a twenty-minute drive to the town of Glennallen to deliver the eagle to the local animal clinic. He half hoped that the veterinarian, Bygood Stanton, was out on a call but immediately felt guilty—after all, Stanton had been his friend for years. A veteran of earlier wars, he’d helped Josh a lot during his first year back from Afghanistan. And Doc Stanton was nothing short of brilliant when it came to treating injured wildlife. If only th
e guy didn’t have such an obsession about conspiracies ... Once the man got started on his favorite topic, any conversation tended to be both long and lopsided. Interesting, but escape was difficult if you had other places you had to be.

  Josh grabbed the kennel with both hands and tried to keep it level as he backed through the front door of the clinic. He was glad to see there were no clients in the waiting room, then remembered it was lunch hour and the clinic was technically closed. There was no one at the front counter but Stanton’s voice came booming through his office doorway.

  “Hey Tark, that better not be another damn bear cub.”

  “Nope. Rattlesnake.”

  Stanton snorted loudly. “Do you know how hard it is to find a place that wants grizzlies?”

  “It’s not a bear. Not a deer either.” He set the cage on the counter.

  “Well, what the hell is it?”

  “Get your ass out here and look—I promise it’s worth the trip.”

  “Damn well better be.” Stanton appeared in the doorway. He was short and slight, with an unruly head of gray hair and immense salt and pepper eyebrows that failed to overshadow his sharp gaze. Josh knew those eyes didn’t miss much—the man had been an accomplished sniper in two wars. And Stanton could never remain grouchy for long. His gruff features relaxed into a grin, and he punched the younger man’s shoulder hard before he peered into the kennel.

  The big eagle promptly fluffed itself up to appear even larger and hissed at the old vet. His shaggy eyebrows rose. “That’s one damn big eagle. Is that what I think it is?”

  “Yup.” Josh was smug. It wasn’t often anyone could impress Stanton. “An honest-to-god golden, a female. Told you it was worth getting off your butt to look.”

  “I’ll be damned. Never had one in here before. What’s her story?”

  “Broken wing, but I think it’s a clean break.”