I opened the door and turned my attention back to my mate and his adopted daughter, still standing on the porch. “Know what this means, Peter?”
“No.” Peter raised his eyebrows in curiosity.
“Means we can work on that other thing we’ve discussed, but you still won’t believe me about.”
The startled look on his face as I climbed into the car was priceless.
They both stood at the porch and waved me off as I pulled out of the gravel lot in front of Peter’s house, my old clunker I’d bought up in Idaho somewhere lolling from side-to-side and bouncing up and down with every rut in the country road that lead from the cabin back to the highway.
As I watched them slowly recede in my rearview mirror, the yellow porch light and all the flood lights surrounding Peter’s little homestead illuminating them like angels in heaven, I reconsidered what I’d thought in Mary’s room earlier that night. Sometimes, what you’re seeing in your rearview mirror is actually your future, and not your past.
Not often, but sometimes.
Chapter Ten – Peter
I was back on the streets of Baghdad, in the Sadr City district, and it was dark. Or maybe it was Fallujah or maybe it was both. The smells and the sights and the sounds from my deployment all mashed together as I sprinted from building top to building top, leaping over the gaps with the ease of a man strolling through a park.
On the streets below, IEDs exploded, men screamed, women and children ran for cover as small arms fire peppered the plaster and stone walls. Sectarian gangs roamed the streets, US soldiers patrolled in their Humvees, night vision goggles pulled down as they sped to the homes and lairs of insurgents.
Wherever I was, it was outside the Green Zone.
My claws tore into the plaster roof, digging for purchase before my powerful legs launched my body through the air over the alleys. Ahead, an apartment building rose above the surrounding city. I could smell the humanity teeming inside, could even see the heat their bodies generated. Still, I sprinted forward. I leaped through the air, my body moving as if it were on a program of its own, driven by just primal forces.
Claws at the ends of my hands and feet tore into the concrete of the wall and gained purchase as I climbed into the sky. I scaled straight up the structure like a squirrel, but making my own grips and toeholds in the rock like it was nothing but mud.
Story after story, I climbed higher and higher, the city spreading out below me in the black-out darkness, the stars arching over me in the vault of the sky.
What was I? Who was I? Why had I been having these dreams?
Still I climbed the impossibly high building, clouds racing past me in the night sky.
To my right, I heard incoherent babbling in Arabic. A woman screamed from the balcony as she looked out to my giant, hybrid form scaling straight up the building. She looked at me, her hazel eyes wide and staring, olive skin shining pale beneath the moon.
I flared my nostrils and sucked in a giant whiff of her scent. She wasn’t who I was searching for.
I heard another scream before she fled back inside her cramped apartment.
Ignoring her, I turned my attention back to the sky and resumed my climb. More floors than I could count later, I stood atop the dream apartment building. An endless urban word sprawled around me on all sides as I crouched atop the edge of the building, my claws digging into the concrete and steel.
I leaned back, raised my snout to the moon and pierced the night with my howling call.
“Peter,” said a familiar voice behind me. “Peter, this is you. This is who you are. Why are you denying it?”
I spun around, my fur raised and bristling off my body, my lips drawn back from my razor sharp teeth.
Dark red hair fell around her face like a curtain, but her blue eyes still pierced me from beneath the veil. “Peter,” she said again, her voice the most beautiful I’d ever heard. Her scent of lavenders and vanilla and blackberries and love filled my nose.
Vanessa.
My mate. She’d found me, finally, even as I searched for her. Across the world, across time, across space. I whimpered and jumped down from the ledge and rushed to her side in a blur.
She reached up, touched the fur covering my snout, and stroked it tenderly. “Oh, Peter. You don’t know, do you?”
I sniffed again, just basking in her scent.
Vanessa looked up into my eyes. “You’re trying to deny it, aren’t you? You’re trying to ignore this, pretend it never happened.”
I whimpered again, a whine building in my barreled chest, echoing and reverberating through me. Deep down, even in this form, I knew she was right. Even here, in this dream, she was right.
“Wake up, Peter,” she whispered, still stroking the side of my snout. Around us, the world began to fade, the apartment building slowly disappearing into the mists of my mind until we stood there together, suspended on nothing as the entire universe simply ceased to exist.
“Wake up, Peter. And be ready. Because there’s a storm coming.”
Gasping, a cold, chilling sweat covering my body, I sat up in bed. The sheets tangled around my arms and legs were damp, soaked through with my perspiration despite the bite of the cool air. I covered my face with both hands, the stubble of my five o’clock shadow brushing against the palms as I struggled for breath.
What had that been? It had felt like a dream, but it seemed like something else as well. Like some sort of hyper-real experience beyond time. Almost as if I’d been within myself, truly reliving some event that had never actually happened.
I swung my legs out of bed, put my head between my legs, and took deep breaths until I got back to normal. The whole time, my mind swirled with the fantasies and dreams. The nighttime smells of Sadr City, the sounds of riots and military convoys. I swallowed hard as I raised my head and thudded back onto my bed, arms akimbo.
My eyes traced unseen lines on the ceiling as I tried to piece it all together.
I’d been denying the truth all along, I realized. I was the hybrid Vanessa said we needed. I was the secret weapon we needed to fight someone like Jaeger-Tech.
And I had been all along. Even back when I was in the SEALs, hunting down insurgents in the city centers. Those that my buddies couldn’t find, I did. The ones the US military couldn’t pinpoint for justice, I found and created my own justice.
I knew that now.
The only question now was how did I awaken the beast inside me?
Chapter Eleven – Vanessa
I tossed and turned that night, the memory of Peter’s touch still red hot on my skin. I’d showered as soon as I came home to try to scrub his scent from me. Anything to keep me from obsessing over him.
I don’t know if it was because my soap wasn’t strong enough or my nose was too sensitive, but it didn’t work. Instead, I lay in bed with the smell and feel of him covering me like a blanket. I turned my head and smelled him on the pillow. I turned my head the other way and caught a scent of him in my hair.
Finally, I must have drifted off. Inky blackness enveloped me like an old friend, pulling me into its frigid, restful embrace.
But then, I stood there in an empty glade. Oak trees towered over my head, obscuring the broad swath of the Milky Way and the face of the moon with their stretching branches. Mist coiled around the trunks, writhing like a living thing around the broad old ones of the forest. Dry, brittle leaves covered the clearing floor and rustled as I began to stalk forward into the darkness. My legs moved as if of their own will, even as I shook my head in defiance.
“No, no, no,” I whispered, “I don’t want this.”
“Just let go,” whispered like a breath of wind the voice of a woman, a woman I hadn’t seen or heard since her death two years before. “Just let go, Vanessa. Embrace it.”
I continued to shake my head, trying to reach down and grab my thigh and force my leg to stand its ground. “Ivana,” I pleaded to the phantom visitor. “Ivana, no. Don’t do this to me.”
&nb
sp; “Embrace it,” she whispered again. “Embrace him.”
I was between the trees now, following an ancient rutted path barely more than a foot across. Little more than a deer trail, it wound through the twisting, reaching, grasping trees that rose above me on all sides. Branches clung to my hair and pulled at my clothes.
“Ivana,” I cried, salty tears streaking my face. “Ivana!”
“The daughter of an alpha, mate to an alpha, guide to an alpha.”
Ahead loomed a solid wall of rock. A cave opened in the side, threatening to swallow me with its chiseled and weathered edges.
The gusts of wind blew, bringing me her voice once more. “Inside, sweet child,” she whispered, using the same phrase as she had when she’d first found me near the burned down Frost Estate, holding my sister’s mutilated corpse. “Inside. Find your true meaning.”
“I don’t want to be a wise woman,” I sobbed, my voice choked and strained from tears. But, still, my legs moved me inexorably to the cave mouth. Every step took me closer to my destiny. “I just want to be me. Don’t take that away from me. Please!”
My heart grew lighter, though, as I saw him standing just inside, the darkness wrapping around the edges of his form, but not dulling that warm, welcoming smile of his that he so rarely displayed. Peter Frost, my mate. My partner. The darkness behind him wasn’t an evil darkness, either. Just the night, the shadows from the hidden world. The shadows of secrets. Secret knowledge, secret histories.
“The pack will accept you,” Ivana whispered as Peter stepped back into the darkness, fading away like a man descending into a tar pit.
My heart sank. My legs stopped propelling me forward of their own volition.
His hand appeared from the cave, entering the milky light of the autumn moon shining down on the misty, supernatural forest. He beckoned me with a wave.
I realized then that my legs were again my own. They were mine to control. I swallowed hard, terror and uncertainty filling the cavity of my chest.
My mate beckoned again.
I took a deep breath and nodded before stepping into the void.
As the darkness consumed me and wrapped me in its loving embrace, I heard Ivana’s whisper again. “You only need to accept the pack first.”
I awoke with a startled cry, sitting straight up in bed, eyes wide as saucers as I looked around the room. I could feel the aura of the old witch of a shifter woman who’d taught me to embrace myself and all parts of my being. To embrace being a lone shifter wolf in a dangerous, unforgiving world. Who’d instructed me in the ways of crime, of flying below the radar, of staying hidden from the hunters. Her presence was almost as tangible as the bed I lay upon or the drenched sheets covering my naked body.
“Ivana?” I whispered, my head whipping from side to side as I desperately searched for her. “Why now? What are you trying to tell me? Please…”
Silence.
Nothing but silence.
Only the memory of her words in my dream, her breezy whispers of acceptance, of the pack, of opening myself to him, of guiding Peter forward.
I swallowed hard, still panting a little. The memory of the vision-like dream still loomed in my mind, pushing all other thoughts to the edge.
I didn’t entirely know what the dream had been about or what its purpose had been. It was as if Ivana was reaching out from the beyond, trying to guide me forward. Or was she just some part of my mind trying to make sense of this crazy world and everything going on inside it?
Whatever the purpose of the dream was, it had felt realer than any I’d ever had. Realer even than all the ones I’d experienced about Peter over the years.
I might not know what its source had been, or what it ultimately entailed, but I did know one thing.
I needed a drink.
Chapter Twelve – The Hunters
The stranger’s footsteps echoed through the stone walkways of the modern castle as he made his way into the dining hall from his upstairs suite of rooms. Lights were ensconced in the ceiling every ten feet or so, doing more to light the way than the dismal gray light streaming in from the westward facing windows.
Yes, this was the proper headquarters for their little escapade in Enchanted Rock. In fact, it was likely the most proper venue they’d been able to find since he was shipped over to this side of the pond. There was plenty of room for the men’s barracks, and more than enough for the equipment needed to pacify the shifters they’d soon have in their possession.
Rounding the corner and entering the dining hall, he called to Klaus, who was already seated at one end of the large, rectangular table. “Good morning, Herr Klaus. Sleep well? I see you’ve already had breakfast brought to you.”
“I was up early,” Klaus said, his great shoulders heaving as he tore into his breakfast with a butcher knife in one hand and a barbecue fork in the other. His meal, or what remained of it, was laid out in front of him: a whole beef roast, nearly a dozen eggs covered in cracked black pepper, and less than half a loaf of dark brown bread.
Klaus was, to put it mildly, a giant. At almost eight feet tall, he was the broadest and most imposing figure the stranger had ever seen in person. And his lack of good looks didn’t do him any favors because, not only was he as large as the mythical ogre so popular in old faerie tales, he was also nearly as ugly. His nose was too large for his face, his eyes too small for his head, and his elephantine ears were twisted and deformed. His mouth, though, had kept perfect scale with the rest of his overly large body.
But what the giant lacked in good looks he more than made up for with his sheer brutality and fighting spirit.
“Trying to slim down your figure a bit, I see,” the stranger said as he made his way to the far end of the table and took a seat, the screeching scrape of the chair’s legs echoing throughout the chamber. “You tend to eat a little more than this on a normal day, don’t you?”
“Nervous,” Klaus admitted, his German accent so thick one would need the giant’s butcher knife to cut it. “Big day ahead, much work to do.”
“Yes,” the stranger admitted, smiling a little as he folded his hands on the table in front of him. “I assume the men are ready?”
“Ja, the men are in place around town, and my squad is assembling outside in thirty minutes. They are briefed and know what to do.”
“Excellent,” the stranger said, as a server appeared in the room from a concealed doorway with a platter of food in one hand. The platter was full of beans, toast, sausage, bacon, grilled tomatoes, and mushrooms. The server set the plate down in front of the stranger and backed away quickly and silently before he could be noticed.
“You will be ready as well?”
“Oh, yes,” the stranger said as he unrolled his napkin and folded it in his lap. “I’ve been assured my little biker friends are en route as we speak. Perfect auxiliaries for our own men.”
“They will behave, ja? Lack of disciplines in the ranks is not to be tolerated.”
“You know, Klaus, I see why they call you the Prussian. All about military honor, aren’t you? Discipline this, discipline that.”
“They call me the Prussian,” Klaus said, stabbing his pronged barbecue fork into a thick slab of meat, “because I am Prussian. I come from a long, unbroken line of military service. I do not approve of your use of these so-called bikers. They are rabble. Untrained, difficult to control.”
“Says the man who teased the last shifter he got within arm’s reach of.”
Klaus glared across the table at him, his look sour enough to turn wine into vinegar. “That incident was not like this, a fact of which you are aware. That was one tiny shifter woman. This, though, is a well-trained group. Special forces, most of them. If we’re to bring these in alive, to ensure a steady supply, we need to be unrelenting. Those are our orders.”
“Don’t talk to me about what we need or don’t need, Klaus. Do I need to remind you I’m on the council? I know their aims better than you. All that aside, the Bonesmen may be a ris
k, and perhaps difficult to maintain control over, but they are my risk. Besides, the mission in Portugal six months ago was a staggering defeat, and the council needs us to be miserly with our resources. I can’t just throw good soldiers after bad if everything goes pear-shaped, can I?”
The giant stabbed his double-pronged fork into a slice of roast the size of a filet and stuffed it into his mouth. The whole time he chewed, he stared at the stranger with eyes like poison-tipped spears.
The stranger held his gaze as he began to break his fast. “You will do,” he said after delicately chewing the first bite of sausage, “as you’re told, Klaus. No deviations. The council is running low on reserves, and one mistake could mean the end for us.”
Klaus just continued his stare. His eyelid fluttered a bit and twitched.
As the stranger chewed, he caught the twitch. What was that? A sign of concealment? The big German was hiding something from him. What could it be? Secret orders from the council? His own plan?
As daring as the stranger was, and as erudite and inquisitive and decisive as he may be, he knew not to trust in the future when variables were in play. Especially when they first came into play on the morning of your largest operation in over a year.
No, there was something rotten in Denmark here. He and Klaus had worked together for decades. Oftentimes philosophically at odds, but still they worked well together even at the worst of times. Never had Klaus questioned his decisions before, though. And never, not even under the most stressful of conditions, had he ever twitched.
The realization was decidedly unsettling to him. Klaus had always seemed the trustworthiest, straightforward of souls. Of course they didn’t agree on everything, but he’d never displayed any sense of duplicity even once before. It was, to the stranger, like being informed water wasn’t wet anymore, or the UK had replaced their queen with a president.
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