Winter Tails: A Limited Edition Winter Shifters Collection

by Fox, Piper

  Figuring that out was for another time, though. There wasn’t much I could do to help her until she confronted the things she’d learned about monsters.

  In the meantime, I’d gotten hit with the Call, pulling me toward Utah.

  And then the van had broken down again, for the second time in a week. I’d just gotten it exactly like I liked it, too. The inside had been converted to be a perfect living area for me and Wolf. But I was beginning to think I was going to have to get a whole new engine if I wanted to keep traveling in it.

  Unless I’d gotten it running now. I climbed back into the driver’s seat and turned the key. Nothing.

  “Dammit.” I banged my hands against the steering wheel. I checked my phone for about the sixth time since we’d ended up here in the middle of nowhere. No reception. I wasn’t even entirely certain where we were. That wasn’t all that unusual. I generally just let the Calling lead me once it took hold.

  What was odd, though, was the fact that the Calling wasn’t pushing me right now. Until the van had stuttered to a halt an hour ago, I’d had a very clear sense of where I was headed—more than usual, even—but I hadn’t even realized that it wasn’t still tugging at me to keep moving until just now.

  I paused, frowning, and turned in a circle, trying to see if I could find it again as if it were an errant scent on a breeze that for a second, I had picked up on.

  Nothing. Just like the van.

  Maybe for once, the damned Call was going to leave me alone until I was in a position to actually follow it.

  Yeah, right. And I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona.

  I climbed out of the driver’s seat and into the back compartment, where I flipped up the wood pallet that held my light mattress in order to get to the small storage area directly beneath it. I had a paper atlas there, along with maps for each of the states I was likely to work in. There are more cell towers going up every day, of course, but not everywhere had coverage yet. I wasn’t about to give up my paper maps until I could rely on my phone’s map apps one hundred percent of the time.

  When you’re cursed, it’s best to be prepared.

  Wolf padded behind me, and I sat down cross-legged on the van floor, using the bed like a desk. Wolf sat back on his haunches, craning his neck out to look at the map, too.

  “There’s something weird about this area,” I said. “I just remembered it. Like, a ranch or something?” I flipped through the pages of the atlas until I got to Utah. “Oh, right, here it is.” I put my finger on it. “Poltergeist Ranch.”

  Wolf tilted his head and perked his ears up in the signal that he used to tell me he wanted more information. At least, I assumed that’s what it meant—that’s how I treated it, anyway.

  “It’s some sort of locus for all sorts of supernatural phenomena. Scientists came out in, like, the 90s, I think, and tried to prove the ghosts and monsters showing up out here were real. Daddy told me all about it—he and Mama were out here then, too, making sure that the scientists didn’t take away any definitive proof.” I shook my head at the thought of all the ways the Silvers worked behind the scenes to keep the world safe. “The owners turned it into some sort of tourist trap. I don’t know if there are even any more supernaturals out here.”

  I traced the line representing the highway we were on back to the last town we’d passed through, then returned to about where I suspected we were now.

  “At any rate, I think we’re close to the main part of the ranch. We should hike over there and see if we can get somebody with more mechanical skill than I have to work on the engine.”

  Leaning past Wolf, I grabbed my heavy, Army-green parka off the back of the driver’s seat, where I hung it when I wasn’t wearing it. I pulled it on, then gathered up two water bottles and dropped them in the pockets. Wolf watched me with wary eyes.

  “I’m going to bring the collar and leash just in case anyone makes a noise about you being a wolf. Or a giant terror of a dog.” I’d learned traveling with Wolf that he had plenty of facial expressions, even in his animal form—including rolling his eyes. I dropped the leash and collar into my pocket, anyway.

  I went ahead and geared up, too. I always kept a knife in my boots and a loaded gun in the glove compartment. I had left it there while I was working on the van, trusting Wolf to let me know if I needed to stop and grab it. Now, though, I went ahead and strapped on the shoulder holster to wear under the coat. I never knew what I might run into out on the road.

  I hoped I was right about where we were. At the absolute worst, though, we would walk a few miles and then come back and sleep in the van. We set out on the highway in what I hoped was the right direction.

  About a mile and a half later, we came upon a sign pointing to the turn-off for the Poltergeist Ranch. “See? It’s not bad at all. We’ll get someone to come help us, maybe call a tow truck, and be back on our way in no time.”

  Wolf looked askance at me at the oh-so-cheerful tone I adopted.

  “A girl can dream, okay?”

  Wolf snorted, and we continued along the road. It was less than a mile to the turn onto the unpaved drive that led to the ranch, according to the signs. We were only part of the way up that drive when, around a curve, we came upon a gate bearing a giant sign that said Closed for Winter.

  “Dammit,” I muttered. But this time I didn’t have a steering wheel to thump. I inhaled deeply. “Okay. Last I heard, the family that owns the ranch lives here. Maybe they’re here all year round. Let’s see what we can find.”

  I scaled the gate pretty easily and made my way along the barbed wire fencing until I found a loose piece I could hold up far enough for Wolf to shimmy through. Then we moved back to the driveway and headed toward what I hoped were the owners’ houses.

  When we got there, there were houses all right, or at least buildings, but they were dark and completely empty. I could tell just from the quality of the air that there was no one else around, but I knocked on the door of the log cabin labeled Main Office, anyway. When no one answered, I sat down on the steps and put my head my hands. “Okay. This is still no big deal. We’ve got everything we need to stay in the van for days if we have to. And someone will come by before then.”

  Wolf whined, I hoped in agreement. He put his chin down on my knees and looked up at me with his big, ice-blue eyes.

  I took off my glove and buried my fingers in his brindle fur.

  “You know,” I said, “if you would shift into human form once in a while, we could talk this stuff out. Maybe you’d even have some useful suggestions.”

  He gave me a definite shrug at that.

  “You can’t shift, can you?”

  He shook his head, I assumed in agreement.

  I sighed and gave him a quick hug. “Okay, let’s get back. We can figure the rest of this out tomorrow.”

  Moonlight limned the trees casting shadows over the drive. The only other light came from the stars above. This far from city lights, I could see the Milky Way stretched out above me.

  Luckily, nighttime in the country didn’t bother me. Unlike my cousin Cassie, who had hated training out in the desert at night when we were children. She’d had the same training I had—we all moved around, visiting each other’s families to learn what they had to teach us—but she’d never been interested in hunting anywhere but in the cities.

  I could certainly manage city hunting—I’d done plenty of it in Dallas, Oklahoma City, Phoenix—but I preferred the open countryside. I liked being able to see what was coming at me before I could smell it.

  Even in the dark, for example, it was possible right now to see that there was something slinking around the edges of my vision. More than one something, actually. Wolf’s ears went back out against his head, and he growled as the fur along the back of his neck rose.

  As the creatures circled around us, one of them moved through a beam of moonlight, its form completely illuminated for an instant.

  It was almost as tall as Wolf, moving on four legs,
but those legs seemed somehow misshapen, the knees knobby and bent. It was furless and gray with a ridged back, a shortened muzzle, pointed ears like a jackal, and an almost human intelligence in its eyes.

  “Oh, hell,” I exclaimed. “It’s a chupacabra. A whole pack of them.”

  I had the entirely wrong weapons for this fight. The best way to kill a chupacabra was with a gold blade. I assumed that was left over from the Incas because they had, according to legend, created these particular monsters in the first place.

  “I didn’t think they came this far north.”

  Wolf rolled one eye toward me. He’d started doing that recently whenever he thought I was talking too much when I should be acting.

  I was going to have to think for a minute to figure out what to do about this pack, though. “Okay. I believe my bullets will slow them down.”

  Also, weren’t they like vampires? They couldn’t get into a building unless someone invited them in? I couldn’t remember. It wasn’t like I’d had a lot of experience killing chupacabras. Were we going to have to try to break into the house, or maybe one of the outbuildings?

  We won’t have enough time, or a big enough head start, to make it back to the van. And even if we did, it’s stalled out. We can’t go anywhere from there.

  Though at least I had gold blades in the arsenal under my bed.

  Ah, hell. I’m going to have to use my magic to save us.

  My magic skills had always been for shit.

  Apparently, some of my ancestors had been good at magic. Daddy said Mama was a solid magic user, which from him was high praise.

  But how could I use my magic to save us?

  Gold. I need gold.

  I had no idea if there was gold to be mined in Utah. And even if there was, I didn’t know if I had the magical strength to pull it up out of the ground. There were old stories of magic users who had been able to do that, but I was pretty sure metallurgy was not one of my strengths.

  I glanced around at the various building that made up the ranch. The main office, a stable or two, what looked like it might be some kind of quarters for guests, or maybe for the ranch-hands. And one building that looked like it was perhaps the house that the owners lived in.

  That was my best place to start.

  “Come with me,” I whispered to Wolf. He was already pressed up against the back of my legs and my waist, facing in the opposite direction from me. Watching my back, as always. I sidled toward the main house, Wolf moving with me. The circle of chupacabras tightened around us as we moved. All told, there were six of them, two more than I would comfortably take on even if I had a gold knife on me. And that was with Wolf’s help.

  They didn’t let us get all the way to the front porch of the house. But we got close. About six feet away, the closest animal growled, warning us not to take one more step. Wolf growled back, but he didn’t move, waiting for my lead.

  I turned in a slow circle, Wolf still protecting my back, to examine each of the creatures surrounding us. To anyone watching, it would look like I was searching for a weak point. And in a sense, I was, but more than that, I was sending my magical senses questing outward, up and down and to every side, searching for gold.

  I didn’t dare close my eyes for fear of looking too vulnerable, but I did let them glaze over with a sort of magical haze, leaving me with an overlay of what I could see with my mystical sight as opposed to my usual vision.

  The gold stood out in tiny, bright sparks. There wasn’t much of it, but perhaps enough.

  “We’ll have to wing it,” I said to Wolf.

  He huffed in response as if to say, When do we not wing it?

  I need to talk to Wolf about his smart mouth. If I ever get a break from defending the world from evil.

  I sent my magical senses questing into the ground once more, just in case there was some hidden vein of gold that I could pull up and use.

  As with everything this night, nothing.

  So, instead, I pulled on those bright sparks of gold in all the buildings surrounding us. I didn’t have an incantation prepared, didn’t have any special hand motions ready, so I decided to improvise. I spun my hands into a shape as if I were holding a ball, swirling them around in a circle as I gathered all the gold in any one building together.

  I felt the metal straining against me, heavy and dense. My eyes were unfocused, hazy, but I could hear Wolf growling, feel him occasionally lunging out and snapping to keep the chupacabra at bay.

  I felt my magic pitch higher, like a sound I couldn’t hear, a whine just out of sensory reach. Daddy’s voice came to me out of memory.

  It’s like driving a stick shift, baby girl. You feel for when the moment is right, when the engine reaches a point where the whole thing vibrates around you with exactly the right edge, and then you reach inside yourself and pull on it. Change the gears and move your magic.

  And so I listened, and I felt, and I waited until the pitch was exactly right. I yanked on my magic as hard as I could, concentrating on the gold. And as I did, the chupacabras attacked.

  Real fights are not like the ones in the movies. The monsters don’t come at you one by one or even two by two. It isn’t choreographed like a dance or blocked like a camera shot. It’s bedlam. Mayhem. They attack like a mob, coming from all directions. And even when you’re slashing at them with one hand and shooting with the other and magic is swirling through the air in white-gold sparkles, you don’t miss getting hit. Not all the time.

  One of them clamped onto my arm, his teeth piercing the skin, the pain sending me to my knees. The gun I held in that hand clattered to the ground.

  I let myself scream even as I slashed across the animal’s nose with the knife I’d pulled from my boot. It wouldn’t kill him, but it hurt enough to make him let go. I snatched my arm out of his mouth. At that moment, as I pulled my gun arm in close to my chest, instinct causing me to protect it, I heard Wolf scream. It wasn’t a howl or any other sound I had ever heard him. It was full of anguish and anger, and I turned to see that the chupacabras had done to him what they had done to me—attack his limbs. Only with Wolf, two of them working together had broken his back left leg. It dangled uselessly, even as he pivoted and turned on the other, still snapping and lunging to protect us.

  This all happened in a matter of seconds. Wolf managed to pin one of them down, ripping its throat out. If I’d had an ax, I would have chopped its head off on the theory that nothing can function well without a head, even if losing it doesn’t kill it.

  As it was, I didn’t know how we were going to escape, if I couldn’t figure out how to use the gold.

  With a golden ax, I could save my life and Wolf’s.

  That thought flitted through my mind exactly at the same moment that a spray of tiny golden objects blew out of the buildings, smashing through windows and leaving glass showering down behind it. Necklaces, rings, I think maybe even one gold filling flew by me, though I couldn’t imagine why someone would have that without the tooth.

  They swirled through the air, coming together in a ball like the one I had imagined as I’d moved my hands. But now they were outside my conscious direction. The objects flowed together, a white-hot light rolling around them until it was too bright to look at. It centered over Wolf, over the chupacabra he had injured, and then the silvery light flowed away from the golden objects to swirl around Wolf’s broken leg.

  Still whirling through the air above Wolf, the gold itself seemed to melt and reform even as I watched, taking on the shape of a tiny tomahawk, a miniature ax with a blade so sharp I would be afraid to touch it. The handle itself was barely big enough for me to hold onto and seemed to be made of other material—maybe whatever else had been attached to the gold I had pulled out of the buildings. It had several jewels embedded in it, so that was my bet, anyway.

  The ax dropped to the ground in front of me, and I dove for it.

  Wolf had gone entirely silent and motionless as the silver-white light swirled up and around him, envel
oping him in some kind of cocoon, almost. I worried that I might have to cut him out of it.

  But I didn’t have time for that now. With a single swing, I finished severing the head of the chupacabra Wolf had taken down.

  And then I turned on the others.

  I kicked the first one to the ground by taking its paws out from under it. I didn’t manage to cut its head off in one clean stroke, but I severed its spine with the golden ax, leaving it twitching helplessly on the ground. That would have to do for now.

  I managed to get scratches in on the others—small wounds, but if they were as allergic to gold as I was to silver, the wounds would fester, and without help, they too would die. As I slashed the nose of the last one, they all turned tail and ran into the darkness.

  I started to pursue them, but my steps faltered at the sound of a strange whine behind me.

  I spun around, my odd little golden ax held up in front of me as if to ward off another attack.

  The sound came from the silver-shrouded cocoon that had been Wolf. It still swirled, but the mist had hardened. As I stepped toward it, the shell crumbled away, and in its place stood a human.

  The same man who had saved me from the silver mine not so long ago.

  Wolf. In his human form.

  I froze, uncertain what to do.

  But he lunged for me, grabbing me up in his arms. “Blaize.”

  My name sounded amazing in his voice, even though it was a little scratchy from disuse.

  “I don’t even know your name.” My response came out as a bare whisper as I stared up at him. Wolf in his human form was stunning. This was the first time I’d seen him without the haze of impending death clouding my vision. He was every bit as beautiful as I remembered.

  I reached up to take his face in my hands. “Why don’t you take this shape more often?”

  He shook his head, his dark hair catching the moonlight. “I don’t have much time. I don’t know why I can do this now, or why I could in the mine, but I am stuck in my … other … form.” He glanced away from me, down to the ground for a second, and then back up into my eyes. He took a deep breath as if preparing himself to say something difficult. “I never cared until I met you. I want to be free of my curse. I want both of us to be free of our curses.”