Moon Dancer

by Aimee Easterling

  Patricia apparently felt the same way. “Are you sure I shouldn’t be the one staying? This is my fault....”

  “Four,” Claw rumbled from beside me. I didn’t even have to turn and peer through the window to know another shifter had showed up in the parking lot.

  And even though I knew Patricia’s fur needed smoothing, my response came out harsh and authoritarian. “We don’t have time to discuss this.” I winced as I remembered how I’d felt when my father used the exact same tone to shut discussions down.

  Regrettable or not, my words got everyone moving. Backpacks were lifted. Quick farewells were uttered. Then four students, three werewolves, plus Val and Benjie all high-tailed it down the stairs and out a side door.

  “Harry.” The single word from Claw was enough to split the other male werewolf off from our party. Harry saluted, a glint of silver keys complete with college keychain whirling around his thumb.

  I frowned. Those matched the department vehicle but weren’t the keys Patricia had been holding. How had Harry ended up with access to our van?

  I had no time to ask however. Because we were outside, the scent of fur so strong I slung my body around to face the danger.

  “No.” Claw’s hand was on my wrist as he ushered us all forward. “Keep going. Don’t meet their eyes.”

  “Eyes?” Jacob paused to pound out a rhythm on the side of a trash can. “I thought tornadoes only had one eye.”

  I shook my head, evading his question. Not only couldn’t I explain, I couldn’t afford to be distracted.

  Because strange shifter scents were drawing closer. Now they were joined by the distinct vibration of approaching footsteps.

  “Faster,” I demanded.

  “I don’t see any clouds,” Emily countered. She stopped dead on the sidewalk, turning a complete circle while staring up into the perfectly clear sky.

  Off to my right, the thud of shoes on pavement hastened. Our enemies were running....

  Then the university van screeched to a halt in front of us. “In, in, in,” Harry ordered. In an unusual display of gentlemanly behavior, he reached back to help Val when she stumbled at the threshold.

  We tumbled in after her. A pile of arms, legs, and backpacks. It was hard to tell where human ended and werewolf began.

  Chapter 16

  For the first time in a long time, Adena greeted me. Perhaps she’d grown lonely while locked up in the van, because she launched herself off the back of a seat and fluttered against my chest as I stumbled upright. Settling her with an effort, I trailed my fingers through slick feathers until I contacted warm skin, one word reverberating through my brain:

  Pack.

  I didn’t have long to bask in our reunion however, because Benjie barreled past without waiting for me to angle myself sideways. “Pardon me, ‘scuse me, coming through.”

  Despite his words, he was far from careful. The shaman had hung onto his duffel bag throughout the run to the hospital and the sprint out of it, and the bulky satchel now swept Adena off my shoulder before whacking against the side of my head far harder than I thought it should have done.

  “Ow. What do you have in there? Rocks?” I grumbled. By the time my eyes had stopped watering, seats had assigned themselves in a manner I definitely didn’t approve of.

  Keeping the werewolves and the students separate had been a primary goal for this trip from the beginning. But Jacob was climbing into the front seat next to Harry—“We guys have to stick together.” Adena had flown from me to Val, which prompted animal-loving Emily and my far-too-astute TA to join them.

  That left me, Claw, and the non-drug-dealing Noah as the only three left standing. There was one empty double seat remaining plus one singleton.

  Which begged the question: Was I going to willingly place a student next to a werewolf? Or would I suck it up and share space with the alpha I’d been avoiding?

  “Window or aisle?” Claw asked. His amusement smelled like honeysuckle.

  I sighed and gave in to the inevitable. “I guess I’ll take the aisle seat.”

  I REMAINED ERECT AND watchful for over an hour. But darkness fell, werewolves remained two-legged, and students stayed blissfully oblivious to the unusual aspects of their seatmates.

  No wonder my head gradually started nodding. Tired, my wolf complained.

  Okay, we can sleep...just not on Claw’s shoulder. Despite my stated boundary, I felt Claw’s arm pull me in closer. Warmth enfolded me as I drifted off to sleep.

  Or maybe I wasn’t being claimed by slumber? Because my eyes blinked back open to the blue of twilight. Panting, I pushed fur-clad legs through deep snowdrifts, a wolf pup clutched to my shoulder beneath another shroud of fur.

  The way should have been slow going, but someone had walked through here multiple times already. Ahead, a flickering campfire drew me toward an elevated bluff that likely housed the trail-breakers. Friends of the cave girl’s? That seemed unlikely since she’d traveled thousands of miles to escape brutal pack mates. Surely if she’d found an ally in the interim, they would have been present at her baby’s birth....

  A clatter of rocks from the direction of the campfire. The cave girl dropped to her knees, hiding herself in a snowy indentation created by the half-formed path.

  I’d been right—the people ahead were dangerous rather than friendly. Torchlight spilled out into the open. The wolf pup chirruped a tentative question.

  “Quiet, sweetheart. Quiet, quiet.” The cave girl comforted her offspring in a sing-song whisper. Our face was hot and sweaty despite the deep bite of wintry air.

  For long seconds we hovered there, damp chill soaking through the skins that formed our clothing. The pup whimpered, feet scrabbling fitfully. Any moment now, it would start to howl.

  Then a shout erupted, not from the pup but from the campfire above us. The words were empty syllables, incomprehensible even using my werewolf-assisted translation ability. Did that mean I could only understand what the cave girl understood, or were these people perhaps human only rather than werewolves?

  The questions were academic, a way to distract myself from the fact that the cave girl was defenseless and I had no way to assist her. Dark shapes bounded toward us as we struggled back to our feet and retreated. We ran, peering back over one shoulder...then lost our balance as we sank up to one knee in a drift of snow.

  Which is when the pup started shrieking in earnest. It was cold and hungry. Our milk was insufficient. No wonder when our belly clenched empty and painful beneath the puppy’s pedaling feet.

  Male hands grabbed our shoulders and pulled us upright. Bearded faces, long hair braided, copper ornaments glinting between the strands.

  They spoke quickly, angrily. We shrank backwards, then stumbled forward as they drew us toward the firelight.

  Another rock shelter. A bonfire large enough to melt any snow that had drifted in from the edges. Women and children rose, sleepy and hesitant. But one stepped forward as we approached.

  She was older than the cave girl. Tall, thin, sure of herself.

  Around her neck hung a dried bear’s paw.

  She spoke a single word and the men released us. Leaning closer, she peered at the baby clutched to our chest.

  The sheepskin robe, at first, overshadowed the pup’s features. But the older woman reached forward to tilt it sideways. We weren’t fast enough to spin away before....

  Furry ears were abruptly exposed to view.

  The cave girl clutched her child, eyes scanning the frowning strangers. The pup shrieked louder. Our stomach rumbled.

  For one moment, we hovered on the knife edge of terror. Then the tall woman extended her arms in the universal language of shared motherhood.

  Wolf pup or human baby, she was willing to help.

  I HALFWAY WOKE TO A cacophony of singing. One of the people in our van could carry a tune, but the rest were hopeless. Jacob’s drumming throbbed in my ears.

  Then Claw shut down the merriment with alpha expediency. “Quiet
,” he demanded. “Some of us are resting.”

  By my guess, I was the only one who’d been sleeping. Something warm puddled in my belly as Claw pulled me in closer, shielding my exposed ear with the crook of his elbow.

  The surrounding chatter faded, but lupine senses allowed me to catch Benjie’s cheeky answer. “Yes, Gruff and Growly. Of course, Gruff and Growly. As soon as you say the magic word.”

  Claw, predictably, growled in lieu of an answer. Benjie chortled. Someone was going to get strangled...but I lost track of my concerns as I fell back asleep.

  Some indeterminate amount of time later, a tickle against my cheek woke me. Adena, I decided. But the brush of contact materialized into tapping human fingers. Reluctantly, I cracked open one eye.

  Benjie loomed above me in a way that would have been menacing if he hadn’t looked like a clown in the near darkness. His red hair stuck out in all directions. His eyes were almost comically wide.

  “We need to talk,” he hissed in the sort of stage whisper that was likely to travel half a mile.

  “Quiet,” I grumbled, closing my eyes and hoping he’d get the message. I’d meant to find a way to disentangle myself from the shaman before fleeing the county, but I hadn’t come up with any brilliant ideas. This was what I got for letting things slide.

  “No, really.” The tapping started up again on my other cheekbone. What was this guy—a twelve-year-old with attention deficit disorder? “I can’t fix your problem if I don’t know how it started.”

  “I don’t expect you to fix anything,” I answered, then stilled as the warm body against my left side shifted.

  We were waking up Claw. The thought made my stomach dip downward.

  Reluctantly, I disentangled myself from Claw’s encircling arm and shoved Benjie back into his seat.

  Now I was the one crouched halfway in the aisle. “Look, I don’t expect anything from you,” I continued, keeping my voice low and hoping Benjie would get the message. “I understand you want to come along. So come. Be quiet. Take your money. When we’re done, I’ll leave you five stars on the website of your choice.”

  In the darkness, Benjie’s silence reeked of disappointment. I’d called his bluff and exposed his weakness...and it was that very weakness that did me in.

  Benjie wasn’t a fake in search of cash. He was a seeker looking for someone to believe in him.

  I sighed. “Okay, look, I’ll tell you. We could use your help.”

  Chapter 17

  And I did, in a whisper, right there in the back seat of the university vehicle. I tried to make my drama boring, like a well-thumbed bedtime story. I hoped Benjie would drift off before I reached the end.

  Instead, his body quivered with excitement when I’d barely started. “Of course,” he muttered. Then, “Animism, I should have figured. You think the people your cave woman met guided her toward the sacred place from the other vision?” I didn’t answer, but he continued anyway. “Of course they did. A bear paw means major shamanic powers...and it also means we’re on the right track.”

  “On the right track?” Despite myself, I cocked my head, wanting to hear his answer.

  “Bear paw...Bearclaw tribe?” While I frowned out my confusion, he dragged his duffel halfway across the seat back so he could root through it. Seconds later, something hard and cold pressed into my hand.

  “This will work much better than a printed statue,” he promised, voice rising in volume by the moment. “When we get to the funeral...”

  I couldn’t stay silent any longer. “Funeral?” I interrupted.

  “At the petroglyph. I should have realized when your stepmother mentioned it that we were dealing with something outside the ordinary.” He continued as if I knew what he was talking about. “After all, the Bearclaw people believe their heritage in the Yellowstone area began much longer ago than other First Peoples. We can use linguistic evidence to trace the neighboring Sheepeaters back to their original homeland in what later became California. But the Bearclaws are a unique offshoot with no linguistic ties to anybody else...”

  I blinked. Maybe Benjie wasn’t a dead weight after all.

  Just when I was getting interested, however, he changed gears, returning his focus to the rock he’d handed me. “You need to carve your wolf into this with intention,” he said, sounding much more like an actor and less like a social scientist this time. “All it takes is belief and intention.”

  And suddenly the wisdom Benjie had seemed to carry shattered. Clothes rustled as a student turned over.

  “Intention, great. I get it.”

  “Soapstone is really easy to handle,” Benjie continued, completely oblivious to my efforts to quiet him. “You can carve into it with a pocket knife....”

  “Not in the dark in a moving vehicle she can’t.” Claw’s arm reached out and drew me back against his shoulder. I fit into his side as if the shape of his body had been made for mine to curve into.

  “Yes, Gruff and Growly,” Benjie prodded, wide awake and craving repartee.

  This time, Claw chuckled, ignoring the bait dangled before him.

  Clutching my soapstone, I fell back asleep.

  “AND YOU’RE sure this is the right direction?” Harry asked from the driver’s seat the next afternoon. There was snow on the ground, spring having eluded us the moment we ascended to a higher elevation. The department van’s tires struggled with a slick spot. The road appeared to be narrowing by the moment.

  “Of course I’m sure,” Benjie answered. His voice was firm but his eyes were wild. He shook his cell phone as if that might prompt the GPS to work.

  Outside the windows, conifers pressed in close against the roadway. We’d nearly reached Yellowstone before turning onto a side road...two hours and ten turns earlier. I wasn’t sure anyone knew precisely where we were now.

  “I’m hungry,” Jacob whined, his fingers drumming a complaint against the dashboard. “I don’t see any restaurants.”

  “Beef jerky?” Patricia dug through her stockpile of provisions and began passing out wrapped snacks to all and sundry. She hadn’t even glanced in my direction first—she was definitely growing into her responsibilities and strength.

  To her credit, food silenced Jacob. Unfortunately, it didn’t solve the larger problem—finding a safe place to stop.

  We’d spent the day pressing bladders to their limits, trooping into bathrooms as a unit, and subsisting on greasy drive-through burgers in an effort to avoid territorial werewolves. Sure enough, the only shifters we’d seen were distant and uninterested. But now we were running six hours behind schedule and I wasn’t so sure a wild-goose chase was worth it at this point.

  Claw must have agreed because he said what we all were thinking. “We’re lost.”

  “We’re not lost,” Benjie countered. “We’re traveling to a remote location.” Then, raising his voice, he called: “Turn right here! No, I mean left. Wait, right!”

  The van swerved erratically, prompting a vomit-heavy burp from Noah. “We’ll go one more mile,” I decided, “then we’re turning back.”

  “But it’s a mile and a quarter!” our supposed guide contradicted.

  “A mile and a quarter then.” Lowering my voice, I pierced Benjie with the glare that had prompted several recalcitrant students to turn in tardy papers. “You said your friend invited you to his father’s funeral...”

  “Grandfather’s funeral,” Benjie corrected before elaborating on the connection. “Sam and I knew each other from school.”

  The tale had seemed realistic when he’d floated it three hours earlier. A college buddy with actual ties to the tribe still using boulders as shamanic art projects. Benjie had sworn the event was open to all mourners. If we could get there tonight we’d be welcomed with open arms...and I could create a soapstone wolf that might actually work.

  Now, though, I noted the evasiveness in Benjie’s eyes and delved deeper into his history. “What school?”

  “Chinton.”

  “Never heard
of it.”

  “...Elementary.”

  I blinked. “You know this guy from grammar school and he’s willing to invite a van-load of us to a gathering that anthropologists would give their eye teeth to attend?”

  “Well, he doesn’t exactly know you’re all coming. I didn’t have time to RSVP....”

  The van lurched before I could decide if it was worth strangling Benjie. We were parking. Harry had actually found something.

  Jacob flung open the side door with boyish enthusiasm. Pounding drums and sonorous chanting rolled toward us. I blinked, surprised. Benjie wasn’t a charlatan after all.

  Then three burly guys stepped out of the trees wearing the kind of frowns I’d last seen when telling my students we were limiting bathroom breaks to one every four hours. Benjie had indeed brought us to a gathering...but we were very much not welcome here.

  “STAY IN THE VAN,” I demanded...one second before everyone under the age of twenty-five poured out onto the gravel.

  “Look at the trees!” Emily turned in her now customary circle, eyes on the canopy. Noah trailed behind her.

  “We’re here! Finally!” Jacob pounded out a rhythm on the hood of the van with his ever-present pencils.

  I winced, beyond irritated by the drumming that hadn’t ceased throughout our journey. Still, I wasn’t quite prepared for the reaction of the tallest stranger guarding the parking lot.

  “Really? You’re going to interrupt an old man’s funeral?” The tall guy smacked Jacob’s hand flat against the van metal, something snapping in the process. I hoped it was the pencil breaking, but had my doubts when Jacob yelped like a kicked puppy.

  This had gone on long enough.

  Leaping out of the vehicle and slamming the door behind me to slow down unruly werewolves, I did my best to sound apologetic and firm at the same time as I pressed into the stranger’s personal space. “I think we made a wrong turn. We’ll be out of your hair as soon as you release Jacob....”