He hadn’t broken yet. I was so proud of him because he’d made it through one full moon and hadn’t broken. But he still could. Years from now, he still might.
I said, “You didn’t see me after I was attacked. I was the same way you are now.”
Looking out across the desert, away from me, he said, “You deserve better than to get stuck with a guy like me.” He spoke so softly I almost didn’t hear him.
Pain filled the words. A gut-wrenching, heart-stabbing kind of pain. Like his heart was breaking. We were pack; his pain became my pain. I thought I knew what caused it: he wanted us to stay together, and he didn’t think we could. Didn’t trust that I would stay with him.
I had to make a joke—I wanted to keep things light. To not face what was happening. I couldn’t even articulate what was happening, it was all gut. Gut and heart. If I didn’t make a joke, I’d burst into tears.
My voice caught. “Are you sure it isn’t more like you deserve better than to get stuck with a girl like me?”
“You could have anyone you want,” he said. He turned back to me. At least he looked at me.
I didn’t feel like a good catch. I didn’t feel like I had that much power. “Yeah, that’s why I’ve been way single since before I got out of college.”
“You’re still young. Plenty of time.”
“You’re not exactly falling into your grave.”
“Feels like it some days. After thirty you start looking back and realizing you haven’t done a damn thing with yourself.”
I wanted to tell him that he was worth the world. That he shouldn’t have any regrets. But I’d really only known him for a year. I was only beginning to understand the baggage he carried.
Before I could say another word, he was walking to the door of the motel, leaving me behind.
Ben worked into the night, sitting at the room’s tiny table, staring into his laptop, typing in notes, shuffling through papers, writing on them. His work spread out to the foot of the bed. I lay under the covers, trying not to disturb him. Not even pretending to sleep. I let him work instead of trying to get him to come to bed, like I wanted. I wanted to jump him and make him relax. I wanted him to forget about work, at least for a little while. I wanted him to believe he was worthwhile.
I flipped through some of the pages that had fallen within my reach. One of them was the coroner’s photograph of Miriam’s body. I studied it, trying to figure out who she had been. What had been going on in her mind, what had made her think that killing her sister and becoming a shape-shifter was a good idea. What had she been like as a girl. I tried to imagine the four siblings in better days: three sisters and a brother kicking a ball or playing tag in the dusty yard of that house we’d been to. I tried to imagine a young Louise before she’d become so frightened and desperate, laughing with a young Miriam who wasn’t dead. Little girls in black pigtails. I could imagine it—but what I couldn’t imagine was what had brought them to where they were today.
What brought any of us to where we ended up?
Ben sat back and blew out a heavy sigh. His hair was sticking out from him running his hands through it over and over again. His shirt was open, his sleeves rolled up, and the job didn’t seem to be getting any easier.
He left the table and stalked across the room. At first I thought he was heading to the bathroom. But he went to the door.
I sat up. “Ben?”
The door opened and he left the room.
I lunged out of bed, yanked on a pair of sweatpants, and shoved on my sneakers.
“Ben!” I called down the hall at him.
He didn’t turn around, so I followed him. He’d already disappeared outside. I trailed him to the parking lot in time to see him take off his shirt and drop it behind him. He continued past the parking lot, through a trashed vacant lot to the desert beyond.
He was going to Change. His wolf had taken over.
We were too close to town. I couldn’t let this happen.
“Ben!” I ran.
He was so focused on the path before him, on what was happening inside him, he didn’t see me pounding up behind him. He wasn’t in tune with those instincts yet, the sounds and smells, the way they bend the air around you and tell you something’s wrong.
I tackled him.
I wasn’t sure I could take him in a fight. He was stronger than I, but he hadn’t had much practice. I half hoped he’d panic and freeze up. I jumped, aimed at the top half of his back, and knocked him over.
Probably wasn’t the smartest way I could have handled that.
On the ground now, I sat on top of him, pinning him down, and tried to talk reason. I didn’t get a word out before he growled at me—a real, deep-lunged, wolfish growl, teeth bared. His bones slipped under his skin—he was shifting.
“Ben, please don’t do this. Listen to me, listen to me—”
Had to keep him on the ground. This had turned into a wolf thing, and this was how the Wolf would handle it. Keep him on the ground, keep on top of him, show him who’s in charge.
I much preferred talking things out with the human Ben. The real Ben. But I couldn’t argue that this was Ben—him with all the frustrations of the last couple of weeks coming to the fore, finally gaining expression and taking over. Deep down I couldn’t blame him.
Screaming a cry of pain and frustration, he struggled, his whole body bucking and writhing. I couldn’t hold him. I almost did, but then his arm came free and he swiped. He struck, and wolf claws slashed my face. I gasped, more at the shock of it than the pain.
He broke away. In the same movement, the rest of the shift happened, his back arcing, fur rippling across his skin, thick hind legs kicking off his trousers.
“Ben!” My own scream edged into a growl.
This was only his second time as a wolf. He stood, and his legs trembled. He shook himself, as if the fur didn’t sit quite right on his body. He looked back at me, and his body slumped, his tail clamping tight between his legs, his ears lying flat. A display of submission. I held the side of my face, which was slick with blood. His slap had cut deep. His wolf was sorry.
I was frozen. Wolf wanted to leap at him. His struggle called her out, and she wanted to run. Keep our pack together. But I was so angry. Anger burned through every nerve and radiated out. She was the alpha and she wanted to prove it.
He ran. The wolf knew better than to stick around to see what I’d do next, so he leapt around and ran, body stretched out, legs working hard.
I sighed, the anger draining out of me. I ought to just let him go. Except that I couldn’t. Had to keep him out of trouble.
I wiped blood off my face, wiped my hands on my sweats, and ran after him.
chapter 16
I could run faster and for longer than someone who wasn’t a lycanthrope. But I couldn’t hope to keep up with a lycanthrope in wolf form. I could only track him, hope he knew I was following, and that maybe he would think about slowing down. Fortunately, his instincts led him true: away from town, into the open desert.
The night was clear, the air crisp, but the moon was absent. The world was dark. Let me go, let me come out, I can see better in the dark.
No.
I smelled prey here—jackrabbits, quail. Ben had smelled it, too, and it slowed him down. I spotted him ahead, trotting now, his head low, his mouth open, and his tongue hanging.
He must have been tired. Afraid. His movements weren’t assured. A wolf’s trot should have been graceful, swinging, able to cover miles without effort. His feet were dragging, his tail hung low. He wasn’t used to this—lucky for me.
“Ben!”
He froze, lifted his head, his ears pricked forward. Then he turned and ran again.
I leaned on my knees, gathered my breath, and set off after him.
We must have gone on like that for half the night. He wasn’t going toward anything. If I hadn’t been chasing him, he might have stopped to try to hunt—I seriously doubted his ability to catch anything in his curre
nt state. But he was just running away, and I just followed. My face bled for a long time; I kept wiping the blood away and didn’t think of it. I only noticed that I hadn’t touched my face in a while when it started itching—scabs had formed and the healing had started. I could only concentrate on my lungs working overtime.
I’d lost sight of him, but his scent—musk and fear— blazed a trail. As long as I kept breathing, I could find him.
He came into view again when he slowed to a walk. I stopped following him then. Instead, I cut over obliquely from his trail. Like I’d stopped paying attention. Like I was circling back. I made a wide loop, and watched him out of the corner of my eye.
As I’d hoped, my change in behavior caught his attention. Now, I just had to tell him I was a friend. I almost wish I’d Changed so I’d have the throat to vocalize it. But I did what I could. I moved slowly, relaxed as much as I could manage, my gaze down and limbs loose. Just out for a stroll.
He watched, ears forward, interested. I kept walking, not moving toward him, not doing anything threatening. He should have been able to smell me—I should have smelled familiar, safe. Come home, Ben. Please.
He started trotting, taking a path that was parallel to mine. I walked a few more steps, then crouched and watched him. He circled me, not looking at me, swinging along, pretending I wasn’t there. But his circles grew smaller, and he came closer. I didn’t move, not even to watch him over my back.
Then, he stopped. He was off to my right. We stared at each other. This wasn’t a challenge. Both his head and his tail drooped. Our hackles were down. I made a conscious effort to keep my arms and shoulders relaxed. We were asking each other: Well? What’s next?
He gave the smallest, tiniest whine. A lost and tired breath wheezing through his throat. I stepped forward, crawling on all fours, and I wished I had a tail to hold out to tell him it was okay, that I’d take care of him. “It’s okay, Ben. It’s going to be okay.” I’d been telling him that for two weeks now. I didn’t know why he should believe me now.
He reached forward, stretching his body low, and licked my chin. I let him, closing my eyes and touching his shoulder. His fur was hot, his ribs still heaving with the effort of his run. I pressed my face to his neck and breathed deep. He leaned into me, whining softly with each breath.
I just kept saying, It’s okay.
The wolf lay down, curling up next to me right there in the dirt—I was going to have to teach him how to find a safe place to bed down. But I supposed he figured that settling in next to me was safe enough. He fell asleep quickly. He dreamed, his breaths whining, his legs kicking out a couple of times. Chasing rabbits. Still running.
I’d taken it upon myself to look after him. To take care of him. So I did, staying awake while billions of stars arced overhead, against a velvet-black sky. More black and more stars than I’d ever seen, with no city lights to wash them out. All the clichés you could think of about the humbling vastness of the universe, the awe-inspiring sweep of sky and stars, seemed true now. The two of us might have been alone in the world.
The night was freezing cold, but I had a warm bundle of fur lounging against me and didn’t mind so much. I buried my hands in his coat and watched the stars. Enjoyed the moment of peace, and hoped it would extend past this night.
I hummed to pass the time, something slow and classical. Slowly, Ben shifted back to human. This was almost gentle compared to the shift in the other direction. There, the wolf tore out of its human skin. But this, the wolf seemed to slip away, fading, limbs growing, hair thinning until only skin showed. By then, dawn had come, the sky growing pale. A bird sang, a series of high, watery notes— an incongruous beauty in the middle of the cold desert. Even in this desolate place, something lived and thrived.
Ben’s skin looked gray, stonelike in the early light. Sitting close to him, I kept my hand on his shoulder, sheltering him. I sensed the moment he awoke; his arm twitched. He snuggled, pillowing his head more comfortably into my lap, which made me smile. I played with a strand of his hair, brushing it back from his forehead. He was awfully cute like this.
He opened his eyes.
“Oh, God.” He squeezed them tightly shut again.
“Morning, sunshine,” I murmured.
He rubbed a hand over his face, shifted uncomfortably on the hard ground. “What happened?”
“What do you remember?”
He thought for a moment, his brow furrowing. “Getting up. I thought I was going to the bathroom—but I just kept going, didn’t I?”
I smiled wryly, brushing damp hair out of his face. That he remembered so little surprised me. I could usually track to the moment I shifted, even though I might forget everything after that. But he hadn’t been in control at all.
“Yeah. At least you made it out of the parking lot before you shifted.”
He groaned again, sitting up. He touched my sweatpants and shirt, which were smeared with blood. So was my hair, which had gone all dried and crunchy. I didn’t want to know how I looked.
He said, “You’re bleeding. You’re hurt.”
“Not anymore. All healed up.”
“Did I do it?” I nodded. “God, I’m sorry.”
“You can make it up to me later. Take me out for a nice steak dinner.”
He thought for a moment, pursing his lips. “We’ve never even been out on a real date, have we?”
I hadn’t thought of it. We’d fallen together by chance. But I didn’t believe that anymore, not really, because something pulled at me. Something that kept me from looking away. I couldn’t turn away from him.
I shrugged. “No sense in being all traditional.”
“Why did you even bother coming after me?” He tilted his head to look out at the horizon. “Why did you bother staying?”
I touched his face. I couldn’t not touch him. I held him, made him look at me, made him see my smile. This was another one of those situations that as a human seemed too weird, too strange to even consider. Sitting in the middle of the desert at dawn, me in pajamas, him naked. But it didn’t feel strange. Sitting beside him, pulling him into my arms, felt right.
“You’re afraid it’s just the lycanthropy. That I wouldn’t be here if we weren’t both werewolves. You should know, I wouldn’t have come after just anyone. I wouldn’t have taken care of just any new werewolf that showed up on my doorstep. I wouldn’t have sat out in the desert all night with just anyone.”
He leaned his head against mine. “You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”
“I don’t know, do you feel better?” He made an indecisive grumble. “Ben, you’re naked. I can’t lie to a naked man.”
He took my hand, where it rested on his thigh. He studied it, rubbing the back of it with his thumb. “If you can’t lie, this is when I should ask you anything. Anything I want to know, now’s my chance.”
This was the kind of conversation new couples had the morning after sex. I was sure I had no secrets from him— he was my lawyer, for crying out loud. But conversations like this were also tests. Uneasy, I said, “Sure.”
“Did you and Cormac ever get together?” He gave a little shrug.
“No. Got close a couple of times. He kept running away.”
He nodded, like this didn’t surprise him. Like it was the story of Cormac’s life. Then he asked, “If I hadn’t come along, would you two have eventually gotten together?”
These were questions I was afraid to ask myself.
“I don’t know. Ben, why do you need to know this?”
“I’m afraid I’ve messed things up for him. Again. But it’s all ‘what ifs’ now, isn’t it? No way to tell what might have happened.”
No. No way at all to tell. Those “what ifs” followed us our whole lives, didn’t they? What if I hadn’t been at that hiking trail on a full moon night. What if I hadn’t met Cormac. What if he hadn’t brought Ben to me but shot him instead. What if I’d invited him back to my apartment that one night…
I had Ben here with me, not “what ifs.” Had to move on.
“You didn’t mess anything up. Cormac never had the guts to say anything about it to me.”
“Ironic. He’s always been the tough one.”
Ben had his own kind of toughness. I smiled. “What about you? Are you with me because you want to be, or because you’re a victim of circumstance?”
He kissed me gently, a press of warm lips. Took my face in his hands, holding me for a moment. And I felt safe with him.
I stood, rubbing the pins and needles out of my legs, and tugged on his hand. “Come on. We’ve got a long walk back, and you have no clothes.”
He covered his eyes and groaned. “It’s just one damn thing after another, isn’t it?”
Slowly, he got to his feet, and we walked back, side by side, arms around each other.
We found his clothes on the way back to the motel, which was good. Then we discovered that we’d both left our keys in the room.
Just one damn thing after another.
chapter 17
We spent the morning replacing the tires on Ben’s car. Then, he wanted to run an errand. He asked me to come along, and I did. He drove, and I didn’t bother to ask where we were going or what he was doing until we ended up on yet another dirt track that led us miles into the desert. We stopped at the bottom of an arroyo, covered with tall scrub, more vegetation than I was expecting to find. Lots of places to hide. This was the kind of area where ranchers grazed herds of sheep, and where wolves liked to run.
I’d never been here, but I recognized it. He didn’t have to tell me where we were. He stopped the car, shut off the engine, and looked out, staring hard. He gripped the steering wheel like he was clinging to a lifesaving rope.
“Is this where it happened?” I said.
“Up past the curve there. Cormac drove the Jeep into the clearing. I don’t really recognize it in the daylight.”