“Nothing’s gone after you yet, it probably won’t start right this minute,” Ben said. He was a lawyer, always the practical one, able to rationalize just about anything.
“It’s waiting for me to let my guard down.”
“Is your guard down?”
Safe in my car, I said, “How would I know? Though if my guard was down, I suppose I’d stop thinking about it. I kind of like that idea.”
“Just hurry home. I haven’t seen you all day.” I heard the twinge in his voice. He couldn’t hide it. He was nervous, too.
“Roger,” I said and waited for him to hang up before I did.
We were a pack, and we needed to be together, so I raced home, maybe a little faster than was safe. Wolf needed her pack, after all.
Chapter 3
A couple of days before my next show, when I would tag along with the Paradox PI team, we had a full moon to get through.
I stood at the front door and called back to Ben. “Aren’t you ready yet?”
“Stop nagging, I’m coming.” He marched from the bedroom, with no revealing evidence of what had delayed him.
“I’m not nagging,” I complained. Nagged, actually. We were late. The sun was setting. We were due in the mountains soon. With my luck, we’d get stuck in traffic on the way there. Shift into wolves behind the dash of my hatchback. Wouldn’t that be exciting?
“Yes, you are.” Ben joined me and dropped a kiss on my forehead.
“You think that makes everything better?” But the warm flush in my gut said that yes, it did make things quite a bit better.
What all the stories and romances don’t say is that happily ever after doesn’t just happen. You have to work at it. You have to keep working at it.
We still argued.
“I don’t want to do this,” he said as we made our way to the car. By “this” he meant the full-moon ritual that drew our werewolf pack together, to Change, to run, to hunt. To stop being human.
“You say that every time.”
“And it’s true every time.”
“But do you have to keep saying it?”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you like it,” he said, almost cutting.
“So do you, and that’s why you insist on saying you hate it.”
“Ah, in with the pop psychology.”
“That’s me,” I said happily. He grumbled wordlessly.
We drove in a stretch of silence until we reached I-70.
“I miss the old days,” Ben said suddenly. “When it was just the two of us.”
The old days. Our pack of two. We’d Change, run, hunt together as a pair. Sleep curled together, wake human, naked, in the great outdoors. Aroused, inhibitions lowered to nothing—we’d spent some very nice mornings together, after full-moon nights.
“Maybe we can sneak off for a little while. The rest of the pack won’t miss us.” I smiled thinking of it.
Ben wore the same dreamy smile. “Hmm. Makes me almost look forward to it.”
On the drive into the mountains, I watched the rearview mirror, waiting to see someone following us. No one did, and we arrived at our destination. One of these days someone in a uniform was going to discover this wooded field at the end of a remote dirt track filled with cars at midnight on full-moon nights. I hadn’t figured out a better way to get the pack to wilderness. Charter a bus, maybe?
My skin itched, every square millimeter, every pore. The car parked and silent, the world dark around us, I sat in the driver’s seat. Ben sat beside me. Outside, people lingered at the edges of the field, waiting for us.
“I don’t like this,” I said. This was the first full moon since we found the word Tiamat defacing New Moon’s door. “I can’t get rid of the feeling that someone’s watching us.”
Ben shook his head. “We’re a pack. Nothing can get to us if we stick together.”
That didn’t make me feel any better. “You’re supposed to tell me that nothing’s out there, that I’m being paranoid and everything’s going to be fine.”
“Everything’s going to be fine,” he said unconvincingly.
Sighing, I got out of the car.
“Hey,” Shaun called to us from the trees. Shaun was, for lack of a better word, our lieutenant, our right-hand wolf. He also managed New Moon for us. Brown-skinned, dark-eyed, he wore a T-shirt and jeans and went barefoot. He was rubbing his arms like he was nervous.
“Is everything okay?” I said. “You see anything, smell anything?”
“Seems clear.” But he shook his head and sounded uncertain.
The forest didn’t look any different. The conifers stood tall and black against a sky painted deep, deep blue by moonlight. The moon sang to my sensitive ears. It’s time. Maybe it was a matter of expectation. We were expecting something to happen, something wrong and dangerous, and so we looked through the trees and saw more danger than was really there.
Some of the pack members had left their clothing in their cars and walked out naked, like ghosts, moving with purpose. Others had already Changed; they were larger than natural wolves, waist-high, padding forward, heads low to smell for scents, tails out like rudders. Becky, Mick, Tom, Kris. The first ones to Change tended to like being wolves, or weren’t able to control themselves as well. They came to our territory, with the moon shining on them, and the wolves took over. These animals trotted to me, their backs at my hips, heads and tails low, looking away. I reached out, hands spread, and let their bodies pass under my touch. My fingers left tracks in the thick velvet of their fur. Grays, browns, tans, blacks. Their eyes glinted yellow and amber. I pressed my lips in a smile.
The ones who were more comfortable in their wolf skins seemed to revel in these nights. The few of us who lingered by the cars, kept our clothing on, our human trappings, still resisted, even though most of us had lived this life for years.
All of them, wolf and human, showed deference to me. The bowed heads, slumped backs, tails flattened between their legs when they looked at me. They didn’t look at me, but around me, glancing away, not daring to meet my gaze, to offer challenge. All of this was body language that said, You lead, we’ll follow, we trust you. So much trust shown in a few gestures. Almost, it was comforting—I didn’t have to guess what the wolves were thinking about me. In the human world, someone could act like they adored you even as they planned to stab you in the back.
Eighteen of us made up the pack. We’d lost a few people over the last year to fighting, battles for dominance, all the crises that happen to a pack in transition. I didn’t want to lose anyone else. I was desperate not to. I wanted to justify the reverence the others showed me.
I wanted to justify what I’d gone through to become alpha of this pack.
It was my job to keep them all in line. To keep everyone safe—from enemies, from each other. From attention. We came here, to the wild, where no one would get in our way. Where we couldn’t hurt anyone. By touch and look, I replied: Thank you. I will lead, I will keep you safe. I was more confident on these nights than any other. I had to be. They had to believe me if they were going to feel safe.
A couple more of those still human among us hunched over, skin blurring, bones stretching, fur growing, muscles straining, voices groaning. Their transformations called up something in me. The itching turned to fire. Time to run.
The wolves of my pack paced into the woods, to the wilds of our territory.
Ben stood at my shoulder. He kissed my neck. “Ready?”
“No,” I said. “I’m never ready for this.”
“Yeah.” His voice was tight, and I knew what he was feeling. Wolf clawed at my insides, howling, It’s time, it’s time.
We walked farther into the woods, some of us human, some of us wolf, to the place where we made our den. A beautiful spot for a picnic, I always thought, shaded over with trees, a well-worn rock outcropping, lichen-covered granite forming a sheltered space. Plenty of space for a dozen and a half wolves to curl up and sleep. It smelled safe, despite my misgivings. We stripped.