Authors: Tammy Blackwell
“
I’m fine. I know it was
touch-and-go there for a while, but…” I took a deep breath. It was
supposed to be an attempt to gather my thoughts and decide how to
word the whole almost-dying-and-deciding-to-stay episode, but that
plan was cut short by the smell of blood. Some of it was mine, but
not much. Nowhere close to most. “You’re hurt!” Of course he was.
Wasn’t that why I came back to the Land of the Living in the first
place?
“
What happened?” I leaned
towards him and caught the sheet just in time. “Where are you
injured?”
“
It’s nothing--”
My eyelids snapped together in my own
version of a Liam Cole glare. “Don’t mess me right now. I’m having
a really bad day.”
“
It’s just some scratches
along my side and on my arm.” When I didn’t ease up on the death
look, he let out a sigh of defeat. It wasn’t until he started to
take if off that I noticed he was only wearing a t-shirt, exposing
his arms to the cold. Of course, I couldn’t exactly lecture him on
it since I wasn’t wearing anything but a sheet.
“
Holy crap! They attacked
you
after
you
Changed?” The markings along his side and up his arm were vicious,
and obviously the work of a wolf.
Liam didn’t look at me as he replaced the
shirt. “It was an accident.”
“
A wolf
accidentally
clawed…” Apparently the
trauma of almost dying was making my brain work a little slower
than normal. “I did that?” It had to have been me. Anything the
other wolves had done would have healed during the Change, and he
wouldn’t have been able to Change in the first place if they all
hadn’t been killed or ran off. “Oh God, Liam. I’m sorry. I’m so, so
sorry.”
It looked awful. The cuts weren’t
life-threateningly deep, but they weren’t exactly tiny scrapes
either. I knew first hand how much being clawed up hurt. And I knew
how hard it was to forgive the one who did it.
Liam was exhausted and in pain. I was
certain because there was no other way he would have curled up on
his good side beside me on the bed, his hand resting on my
out-stretched leg. It was a pose of familiarity and submission,
neither things Liam showed willingly.
“
My fault,” he said, his
words muffled with weariness. “I know better than to stay so close
to a Shifter when they’re Changing. I wasn’t thinking. You had been
laying there so long, barely breathing. I thought you were gone
once there in the night, but I could still hear your heart, and
then, finally, your breaths.” His hand did this absent-minded
rub/squeeze thing on my leg. “When you finally started Changing
this morning I tried to help, like there was really anything I
could do. I was stupid, and got these nice parting gifts to show
for it.”
“
Last night…?” I looked out
the window. The sun was just starting to set. I thought I had been
out for an hour, maybe two max, but… “How long was I
unconscious?”
“
Just a day.”
Just a day? A
whole
day?
Something else was wrong. Alex had said Liam
needed me, and I knew he was right looking into Liam’s eyes.
Whatever it was, I knew I would move heaven and earth - or at least
leave heaven for earth - to ease whatever pain it was lurking in
their depths.
“
You can’t do it,” he said.
“You can’t fight her. You’ve got to keep hiding.”
I would do anything except that.
“
Someone has to fight for
all those lost little girls and the ones who haven’t been born,
Liam.”
“
We’ll find another
way.”
“
There isn’t another way,”
I said. “At least not a better way. I’ve got to do
this.”
“
No.” The rub/squeeze thing
turned into a just plain old squeeze, and a somewhat painful one at
that.
“
I promised Nicole. I have
to do this.”
“
You can’t.” It wasn’t a
command, but a plea. “I can’t lose you, too. You can’t leave me
like they did.” He was shaking. Hands, arms, and lips trembled.
“Please, Scout. Please don’t leave me.”
In that moment all the confusion over what I
felt melted away. Human Scout saw things with Wolf Scout’s clarity.
Liam needed me. As I leaned down, he rose up to meet me. And when
the sheet started to fall, neither of us reached out to stop
it.
***
While Liam caught up on his much needed
sleep, I began to close up the cabin. I put anything we hadn’t
used, which wasn’t much, in one of the cabinets, stored all our
tools, and had a bonfire with all the left-over garbage. I swept
out the cabin, covered the smoldering embers with snow, and rounded
up all my animal traps. And then I waited. And waited. And when I
got bored with that, I had nothing to do but wait some more.
More than once I checked to make sure he was
still breathing.
“
I’ve got everything ready
to go,” I said once he was finally awake and dressed.
All the tenderness and vulnerability was
gone from his face when he said, “Go where?”
“
America?”
His eyes narrowed. “This is America.”
“
This is
Canada.”
“
Which is in North
America.”
Silly Canadians wanting to be part of the
Cool Kids Club. “Fine. The States. The good ol’ USA. The land of
the free and home of the brave.”
“
No.”
“
Excuse me?” While Prince
Not-Always-So-Charming got his beauty sleep, I worried about how I
would be able to face him without dying of embarrassment and shame
after what transpired before he escaped to Dreamland. That worry
quickly turned to anger at his superior, condescending
tone.
“
We’re not going to the
United States.”
“
Yes, we are. It’s time.
I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be. And we’re going to do this on
my terms. Not theirs. Not hers. Not yours.” I pushed into his
personal space. “We’re returning to civilization so I can rebuild
my strength and put on a little more muscle.” We hadn’t starved
over the winter, but we hadn’t been eating well enough to keep our
weight up with all the training we were doing. Both of us fought a
constant battle to keep our clothes from falling off our shrinking
bodies. “When I’m back to a hundred percent, I’ll make my
Challenge.” I jerked my chin up, putting the force of my conviction
into my words. “I’m ready.”
A muscle jumped in Liam’s jaw. “And if I say
no?”
“
You can’t stop me, so
don’t even try. It’ll be a waste of breath.”
I’ve heard people talk about the air being
charged before, but I didn’t really get it until that moment. Liam
and I stood face to face… or face to chest if you want to be
technical. But even though I had to crane my neck to look him in
the eye, I didn’t feel small or disadvantaged. In fact, I felt
powerful, as if the Dominance I had seen on other Shifters, like
the Stratego, was pouring off of me in waves. And that Dominance?
It was colliding up against the Dominance Liam was throwing off
just as strongly. If I could have broken eye contact without
yielding I would’ve looked around to see if it was actually
happening, but I didn’t really have to. I felt it in every cell of
my body.
Just when I thought we were going to have to
solve this with a fury of fists, Liam dropped his eyes, sighed, and
ran his hand over the back of his head.
“
We don’t have a canoe,” he
said, all aggression bled from his voice. “There’s another path
back to civilization, but it’s going to take more than a night to
get there, and there won’t be anything fit for our human forms
between here and there.”
“
What are our other
options?”
“
There will be a boat
waiting for us after June first. We wait until then and go back the
way we came.”
No way was I sitting around here and waiting
until then. “I can hold my wolf form long enough to get us wherever
we’re going. We’ll leave today.”
Instead of arguing, Liam asked, “When
today?”
I looked around the cabin that had been my
home for half a year and knew there was nothing left for me here.
“How about right now?”
Chapter 23
“
Everyone is staring at
us.”
Liam glanced up from his All-Star Special.
“If by ‘everyone’ you mean a nearly comatose drunk man and the
homeless woman having a conversation with the salt shaker, than
yes. Everyone is staring at us.”
We were in Ely, Minnesota. I think Liam may
have been aiming for Fargo, but we got a little off course
somewhere.
“
The waitress keeps cutting
her eyes over here,” I muttered without moving my lips. I tugged on
the XXL Harley Davidson hoodie engulfing me. “What if she
recognizes the clothes and calls the cops?”
Liam grabbed a piece of toast off my plate.
“She doesn’t recognize your clothes,” he said, not even attempting
to be discreet. “And even if she did, she’s not going to call 9-1-1
over some stolen pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt when I’m pretty
sure her co-worker is cooking up a side of meth to go with
everyone’s waffles.”
I tugged on the hoodie again. It felt wrong
against my skin, all scratchy and sinful as if I was having an
allergic reaction to immorally obtained clothing.
I had never stolen anything before in my
life. When we were kids, Jase took a Snickers from the Five Star
when Mom wouldn’t buy him one. I ate one bite, and it felt like a
lump of lead sitting in my stomach. It was my last brush with
thievery until Liam and I assumed human form again for the first
time in several days. I hid in the bushes while he broke into the
house and procured something to cover our nudity and enough money
for a Waffle House smorgasbord.
Maybe I would have felt differently if he
thought to grab me something other than a pair of four inch
too-short pink jogging pants and a hoodie big enough for two Scouts
to fit in.
Liam, meanwhile, was sporting a pair of snug
fitting jeans and an almost-too-tight black shirt, which might have
been the true reason for our waitress’s frequent glances.
A bell jingled as a couple of men in
matching work shirts came through the door.
“
We’re going to have to get
out of here soon.” Liam mumbled around his coffee cup.
I nodded, noticing an old SUV and beat-up
station wagon pulling into the parking lot. “Yeah, it looks like
the breakfast crew is arriving. Any ideas about where we should
go?”
“
I can get my hands on a
phone and call Miriam and have her send us some money, but it’ll
take an hour or two before she can get it, and then we’ll have to
find a Wal-Mart or something with a Western Union.”
I nodded at the building that held my
attention through much of the evening. “Let’s go there,” I said.
“They’ll probably let you use a phone, and there are some books I
want to look at again.”
Liam turned so he could see what I was
talking about. “A library? Seriously?”
“
There is nothing wrong
with being smart.” I started to slide out of the booth. “Brains and
the ability to Change at will. Honestly, Liam, what more could you
want in a woman?” I realized what I was implying as it slipped out
of my mouth. I continued on to the bathroom just as I had begun to
do, not looking back so I wouldn’t see the panicked horror I knew
was etched on his face.
***
There weren’t any hours posted on the
library’s entrance. It was too early in the morning for it to be
open, but I tried the doors anyway. Amazingly, they were
unlocked.
It was a small library, probably the same
size as the one I frequented in Timber. But where our library was
housed in an old church and was filled with dark wood, stained
glass windows, and an air of reverence, this was one of those
completely modern affairs with lots of gleaming metal, taupe
colored furniture, and glaring lights. I did a quick sweep of my
surroundings - which were completely deserted with the exception of
Liam and me - and headed off towards the stacks with purpose.
Although I had never visited the Ely Special
Collections Library in person before, I was familiar with part of
its collection. When I first found out what Alex was, I requested a
ton of books on werewolves through Inter-Library Loan in my
uber-nerdy research attempt. The most informative books came from
this library.
I thought I would be able to walk straight
to what I was looking for, but I was wrong. Unlike the Lake County
Public Library, there weren’t just a handful of books on aliens,
vampires, and werewolves hanging out at the beginning of the
non-fiction section. No, their selection went on for aisles and
aisles. I wandered the rows, my fingers trailing over the spines,
most of which were simply stapled together or had one of those
cheap ringed bindings. I came seeking one of the books I borrowed
forever ago, but what I discovered was even more interesting. To
heck with a few hours, I could spend days here.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t going to have even a
single hour, let alone the endless ones I craved.
I sensed the buzz of power in the air at the
same time Liam did. He was silently following me, but as soon as a
tickle creeped across our skin letting us know another powerful
Shifter or Seer was nearby, he jumped to attention, attempting to
push me behind his tense body.
It might have worked better
if I hadn’t been trying to shove
him
behind
me
at the same time.