“Wow. You’re really loud. While you’re yelling, I’ll make a step, and throw you out.”
“You’ll make a what and what me what?”
“Make a step with my hands. Like this.” He bent forward to show her, and they promptly bonked skulls.
“Ow!”
He could feel himself get red. “Sorry.” And red wasn’t the only thing he was getting. What had he been thinking? She was right: he’d left his brains up there with the seagull shit.
“This was your solution?” she scolded, rubbing her forehead. “No cell phone, no rope, and now we’re both down here?”
“It’s really small down here,” he said, trying not to sound tense. “It didn’t look that small from up top.”
“It’s a hole, Boy Scout. Not a cavernous underground lair.”
He scratched his arm, and when his elbow knocked against the side of the hole, sand showered down, which made him itch more.
“Can you breathe okay?” He tried not to gasp. “Is there enough air down here? I don’t think there’s enough air down here.”
“Oh boy oh boy. I am not believing this. You actually took a terrible situation, made it worse, then made it more worse. Are you all right?”
“It’s just that there’s no air down here.” He clutched his head. “None at all.”
“You’re claustrophobic and you jumped down into a hole?”
He groaned. “Don’t talk about it.”
“But why, Boy Scout?”
“Couldn’t just leave you here. But you’re not really here.” He sniffed hard. Her hair was a perfect cap of dark curls (he thought; there wasn’t much light down here), and under normal circumstances he would find that extremely cute. He sniffed her head again. “I don’t think you’re here at all.”
“Boy Scout, you have lost what little tiny cracker brains you had to begin with.” She managed to fold her arms over her chest and (he thought) glare at him. “If this is some elaborate ploy to impress me in order to get laid—”
“I can’t have sex with you. You’re not here.” He gasped again. “I can’t breathe. How can you breathe?”
“Well, apparently I’m not here,” she said dryly. “And don’t get me started on why the whole oxygen thing isn’t a problem for me. I— What are you doing?”
He stumbled around and was scrabbling at the sandy walls, digging for purchase and doing nothing but pulling a shower of sand down on them both.
“Boy Scout, get a grip!” She coughed and spat a few grains of sand at his back. “You’re just making it worse!”
She was yammering at his back and he didn’t hear, couldn’t hear, sand was everywhere, in his mouth, in his ears, in his eyes, and it was so close, it wasn’t a hole, it was a grave and it was filling up, filling up with him in it.
He clawed at the wall, pulled, yanked, scrabbled, tried to climb, and he could hear the woman yelling, screaming, feel her blows on his shoulders and they were as heavy as flies landing.
Then the moon was there. The moon came for him in the grave and took him out, took him up and out, and he was able to gouge himself out of the grave with two ungainly leaps and then he was screaming, screaming at the moon, howling at the moon, and she wasn’t screaming anymore, the grave was full and she was quiet, at last she was quiet and he ran, ran, ran with the moon and his last thought as a man was, “What have I done?”
Chapter 4
“It’s around here,” Burke said, so ashamed he couldn’t look up from the sand.
“Around here?” Jeannie Wyndham, his pack’s female Alpha, poked at the small dunes with a sneakered toe. “That’s pretty vague for a guy with a nose like yours. Is this the spot or isn’t it?”
“I…think it is. It’s hard to tell. I can’t smell her at all. I can just smell me. And I’m all over the place. After I got out of the gra—hole, I just ran.”
Michael, his pack leader, was crouched and balanced on the balls of his feet as his yellow gaze swept the area. He said nothing, for which Burke was profoundly grateful. He couldn’t have borne a scolding, as much as he deserved one.
“Burke, give us a break,” Jeannie said, sounding (no surprise at all) exasperated. “You stumbled across a woman who needed help—”
“And I left her to die.”
“—and you did what you could. You guys are— Every werewolf I’ve ever met is such a screaming claustrophobe you should all be on tranqs, but you jumped into a hole to try to save her before you Changed. She didn’t have a chance in hell anyway.”
Burke could think of several chances the poor dead woman might have had, but it wasn’t prudent to correct Jeannie, so he stayed silent.
“There, I think,” Michael said. There was a deep depression in the sand, a jumble of footprints—and wolf tracks, leading away. “You’re right, Burke. I can smell you all over the sand, and a few other people—tourists who just came out for the day, people just passing by—and that’s it. Certainly there’s no scent of a woman who’d been trapped in the bottom of a hole for over twenty hours.”
“Well, if you can’t smell her, and Burke can’t smell her…” Jeannie trailed off, then mumbled, “He needs a girlfriend.”
“I’m not making it up.”
“Of course not,” Michael said with a hard look at his wife. She stuck her tongue out at him, and he continued. “But there have been, ah, concerns. You’ve lived alone most of your life. No one sees you. The only time any of us see you is if I summon you—God knows I don’t do that unless it’s a real emergency, or to meet a new baby—”
Burke didn’t say anything, but he knew where Michael was going. Werewolves were not solitary creatures. They were designed to mate young and drop lots of pups. Rogues—even gentle ones—made everyone nervous. Now they thought that the stress of never having children had driven him over the edge. If he hadn’t been so miserably ashamed, he would have laughed.
“At least yesterday was the last night of the full moon,” Jeannie said, shading her eyes as she watched the sun dip into the ocean. “Or there’d be no talking to either of you in another five minutes.”
“I came back to the mansion as soon as I could,” Burke explained. “When I woke up this morning, I was in Vermont.” No surprise. He had run and run and run, but had never managed to leave his shame and guilt and horror behind.
“Well, no one’s around. Why don’t we do a little digging and see what, uh, comes up?” Jeannie asked with faux brightness.
Burke knew, as did Michael, that despite the deepening gloom there were people around, but no one was close. And in any case, digging holes in the beach wasn’t exactly suspicious behavior. Hell, people paid money for clamming licenses just to dig at the beach.
He dropped to all fours and began to scoop out great handfuls of sand with his hands, ignoring the shovels Jeannie had brought.
“Cheer up,” Jeannie said, shifting her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. “There probably isn’t anybody—I mean, we might not find anything.”
“And if we do find anything, it wasn’t your fault.”
“Excuse me,” Burke said politely, “but it was entirely my fault. I appreciate you coming out here with me.”
“Like we’re going to let you dig around in the dark by yourself, thinking you’ll stumble across a corpse? Yuck, Burke! Besides, the whole thing’s a joke. You’re only the nicest, gentlest, quietest werewolf out there. You’d no more kill a woman than I’d break Lara’s arm.”
“Not that she couldn’t use that sort of thing,” Michael said shortly; he was saving his breath for digging.
Burke grunted and kept digging. He knew Lara, a charming creature and the future pack leader, and frankly, he wondered how Jeannie had kept from breaking the high-spirited girl’s arm. The cub wasn’t even in her teens yet, and some of her exploits were already legendary, like the time she jumped off the roof of the mansion and used her quilt as a parachute; except it hadn’t worked out quite the way she planned and she’d come down like a stone, breaking one ankle and sca
ring the holy old shit out of her parents.
Heh. That had been a day.
“How long—are we—going to dig—before we decide—Burke isn’t a killer?” Jeannie panted.
“Until we find the—” Burke froze, reached deeper, and felt his fingers closing around…a forearm. He leaned back and pulled, tears stinging his eyes from the sand. Yeah, the sand and the thought of that poor woman dying alone, dying in the dark, dying as the sand filled her nose and lungs and finally stopped her heart.
Dying alone.
“Oh my God!” Jeannie screamed in a whisper as he stood, pulling the body free from the sand until it was dangling from his strong grip like a puppet whose strings had been cut. “Burke! Oh my God!”
“You— I guess we’d better try to find her family,” Michael said, recovering quickly, which was why he was the boss and Burke was the Clam Cop. “If we can’t, we’ll give her a proper—”
“Oh no you don’t!” the body snapped, swinging in the air and kicking Burke in the shin. “You didn’t dig me up just to plop me into another grave. And you,” she snarled, as sand showered from her hair, her face, fell from her shoulders and her clothes and fangs—fangs?—and hit the beach. “I’m starving and it’s all—your—fault!” So saying, she lunged forward, fastened to Burke’s shoulders like a lamprey, and sank her teeth into the side of his neck.
Chapter 5
It took the combined strength of Jeannie and Michael, plus a lot of tugging and yelling and threatening, before the dead woman was pulled off. Everyone was scratched and bleeding before it was over.
“Don’t talk to me,” the dead woman said, wiping the blood off her chin and backing away from them. “Don’t talk to me, don’t look at me, don’t bury me.”
“But…you…” Jeannie groped for the words and ended up waving her arms in the air like a cheerleader who’d forgotten her routine. “You can’t…you…”
Michael cleared his throat. “Ma’am, you’re dead. You have no scent, you have no pulse. You, uh, should lie down and be dead.”
“Aw, shut the hell up.” She whirled and pointed a dirty finger at Burke, who had been trying to figure out if he was terrified or relieved. “And you! The number of your gross offenses against me grows by the hour! The half hour! Now leave. Me. Alone!”
She whirled and stomped away, her fists clenching as she heard all three of them hurry after her.
She turned back. “Leave. Me. Alone. Any of that unclear? Any of you not speak such good English?”
“I get it!” Jeannie cried with the hysterical good humor of a Jeopardy! contestant. “You’re a vampire!”
“No, she isn’t,” Burke and Michael said in unison.
The body stomped her foot, and all three of them took a step back. “Of course I’m a vampire, morons! What else would I be? A Sasquatch? Nessie?”
“There are no such thing as vampires,” Michael said gently. “I think you must have gone into shock when you were buried and that protected you until we could rescue you—”
“Rescue me?”
“And the whole thing has been too much for your system and now you think—”
“Oh, what crap. I don’t need to breathe, ergo, I didn’t suffocate, and I couldn’t get out of the hole during the day. Ergo, I wasn’t buried alive. Are you honestly telling me that werewolves don’t believe in vampires?”
“The existence of one doesn’t prove the other,” Michael said stiffly. “I believe in witches, but that doesn’t mean I believe in leprechauns.”
“How’d you know they were werewolves?” Jeannie asked, examining the scratch on her left elbow.
“Because Boy Scout lost all his little tiny marbles, went into a screaming fit worthy of a Beatles fan, turned into a wolf, and jumped out of a twelve-foot hole. Call me crazy.”
“Crazy,” Jeannie said brightly.
Burke touched the bite mark on his neck, which was already scabbing over. It would explain a lot: her relative calm at being in such a fix, her utter lack of scent, and, of course, her walking and talking after being buried alive for more than twenty-four hours.
All his life, he had been told legends of wolves and fairies and water witches, and a grizzled beta had once claimed to have seen a demon, but never had he heard of a vampire, or even seen one.
Until, obviously, now.
“You’re alive,” he said, and it was impossible to keep the relief out of his voice, though he tried. Despite his efforts, both Jeannie and Michael turned and gave him odd looks.
“Newsflash, Boy Scout: I’ve been dead for forty years. Sorry about the…you know—” She gestured vaguely in their direction: all three were scratched, bitten, disheveled, sandy. “I was hungry and the thirst got a little away from me. Now, I gotta go. I’d eat a rat just for the chance to have a hot shower.”
Without another word, she turned and moved off into the dunes.
Burke looked at his pack leaders. “Good-bye,” he said simply.
Michael stuck out his hand and they shook. “I guess we won’t be seeing you for a while. If ever.”
“What?” Jeannie asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied honestly. “I guess it’s up to…to…I don’t even know her name.”
“We’ll keep your house for you. Everything that’s yours will always be here for you.”
“What?” Jeannie asked again.
“Thank you, Michael. I appreciate your help tonight. Do I have your leave to go?”
“You have my leave, O brother, and good hunting and many cubs,” he replied, the formal good-bye of a pack leader releasing a beta male from his care.
“You’re going after her? You’ve decided you’re going to be mates and live happily ever after even though she’s dead and you don’t even know her name?”
“Good-bye, Jeannie.”
“Burke!” she yowled, but he ignored her and loped off into the dark, a true rogue, now.
Chapter 6
Somehow, Boy Scout had flanked her, because he was waiting for her in the parking lot, the fluorescent lights bouncing off his black hair, making it seem very like the color of blood.
“I have a shower,” he said by way of greeting.
“One side, Boy Scout. I’ve seen all of you I’m gonna.”
“And a house. You could stay there and…and rest during the day and do your business at night.”
Hmm. Tempting. Credit cards could be traced, a decent hotel wouldn’t take cash, and she didn’t want anyone to see her coming and going. Shacking up with a stranger for a night or two was— Wait. Had she lost her mind? Because she was actually mulling it over. Crazy guy’s offer. As if he hadn’t left her in the biggest fix of her life just last night.
Well. Second biggest.
Although, her gentler self argued, he had tried to help her. Badly, but the effort counted for something, right?
“Please,” he said, and that did it. She was undone; it wasn’t the “please,” it was how he looked when he said it: miserable and hopeful all at once.
“Oh, all right,” she grumbled. “Maybe for the night. I hope one of these cars is yours.”
“It’s not. But my house is just over the dunes, past the Beachside Motel.” He pointed at a row of lights in the distance, and she sighed internally. It had been a rough couple of nights, and she wasn’t up to a hike, undead strength or not.
She opened her mouth to bitch, only to feel herself be swept off the warm pavement and into his arms. “It’s not far,” he promised her, and went loping through the lot and into the dunes.
“Boy Scout, you’re gonna break your fargin’ back!” she hollered, secretly delighted. When was the last time she had been picked up and carried like a bride over the threshold? Her mama had died when she was a toddler; her dad was too busy working two jobs to pick her up; cancer had taken him her first year at the U of M. After that…“I weigh a ton!”
“Hardly,” he said, and the sly mother wasn’t even out of breath. He raced with her across the sand, pas
t the motel, up a small hill covered with stumpy, stubbly bushes, and then he was setting her down on a sandy porch. She turned and looked, and could barely make out the lights of the parking lot. Boy Scout could move. But then, she’d seen evidence of that just the night before.
He opened the door and made an odd gesture—half wave, half bow.
She walked into the house. “No locks, huh? Doncha just love the Cape.”
“No one would dare,” he said simply. “Will the lights hurt your eyes? We can leave them off if you prefer.”
“No, the lights are fine.”
Click.
They blinked at each other in his living room, both getting their first good look at the other, and both entirely pleased by what they saw.
For her part, she saw a tall, thin, black-haired man with gray eyes—the only gray eyes she’d ever seen, true gray, the color of the sky when it was about to storm. He was dressed in dirty shorts, shirtless and barefoot, and as tanned as an old shoe. Laugh lines—except he never laughed, or smiled—around those amazing, storm-colored eyes. His legs were ropy with muscle and his arms looked like a swimmer’s: lean and strong. His hands were large and capable-looking. His mouth was a permanent downturned bow; even when he tried to smile, he looked like he was frowning. She liked it, being in a generally bad mood herself; sometimes it was nice to be away from perpetual smilers, and Minnesota had more than its fair share.
Burke saw a tall woman (she came up to his chin in her bare feet) with a classically beautiful face, strong nose, wide forehead, pointed chin. Black eyes, skin the color of espresso. Long, slim limbs. Wide shoulders that made her breasts almost disappear. Unpainted toes and fingernails; filthy linen pants and a T-shirt so dirty he had no idea what the original color was. And if he closed his eyes he couldn’t see her: she gave off no scent of her own, only sand and sea. She was like a chameleon for the nose; she took on the smells around her, the smells he loved. He thought her accent was the same way: she didn’t sound like much of anything. She didn’t drop her R’s like the locals, had no Midwestern twang, no Southern drawl. She didn’t sound like anything. Or, rather, she sounded like just herself, and that was exactly right.