Page 8 of All These Years
“Let’s hike farther in. I’ve never seen anyone else on that road, but twice there were tire tracks that were not my own.”
“I don’t mind a hike. You lead.” The living scent of my long-lost packmate on the air made my heart leap.
Lee set off between the trees keeping a steady pace, which suited me with my boots still loose. One rubbed my ankle, but I didn’t care about that any more than the sting in my hands. I’d be shifting and healing soon enough. He took us along a deer track to a small clearing where the stone of the mountain rose through the underbrush, its granite surface cool in the shadows.
“Here. You go first.”
I kicked off my boots and yanked my T-shirt over my head. Lee whirled away, and I tensed for a moment, wondering if he’d heard something, but he just scanned the woods around us, gesturing for me to continue with a handwave.
The stone pressed hard against my hip when I lay down naked, but bare rock meant avoiding annoyingly sticky pine needles. I closed my eyes and opened my mind, seeking out the shift energy of the universe. Under that open sky, power came to me freely, sweet and golden, sinking into my body, coiling under my skin. My wolf stirred, blinked, and rose up.
Shift, I urged myself.Paws and nose, speed and sound, strength and healing. Be wolf. Be wild, fast, powerful, dangerous…
Shift energy rippled through me, lightly at first, then deeper. My wolf enveloped me, our bones shaping, muscles stretching, my very breath changing as my chest flattened and thinned. I groaned and heard the sound with wolf-sharp ears. The feel of rock under me changed as my thick wolf coat rushed over my skin. Everything ached and pulled and hurt, but in a good way, a growing-and-becoming way.Be wolf.
Blurred minutes later, I blinked open my eyes, pushed up to my chest, and shook my head, my wolf ears flapping. The world was brighter yet faded, colors muted, the distance blurry. By compensation, a gallery of sounds and smells filled my senses, keys to a universe my human self only dimly knew. And over all of them, thick and dominant and welcome, was the scent of Lee’s skin with the essence of his wolf underneath.
Pack. Home. Him.My wolf stretched toward that scent as if we could roll in every nuance and work that perfection into our fur. I coughed.My fur.When I was in human form, my wolf felt like a second self, locked down deep. In fur, we became one, andwe wanted nothing more than to run shoulder-to-shoulder with Lee.
I stood and yipped at him, a command.Shift, you laggard.
Lee turned at my sound and laughed. “All right, yes. Give me a minute.” He began stripping off his clothes. Even with my wolf sight, I could tell he’d changed a lot from the young man I’d last seen, beyond just the size of his arms. At twenty, Lee had been tall and gangly, wide in the shoulders but built like a runner, as most wolves were. Now, his physical work had put layers of muscle everywhere on his frame. His biceps bulged, his thighs carried far more bulk than mine, and his ass was round rather than flat.
Even his dick was bigger than I remembered, fatter, with low-hanging hairy balls. A solid man, where we’d both been boys.
I couldn’t wait to see his wolf.
He set his folded clothes aside on his shoes under an overhang, next to mine, and lay down naked. Between one moment and the next, his shift took him over. Lee had always been faster at shifting than I was, but he was more impressive now. Within two minutes, fur clothed his whole body and he raised his head, ears twitching. He pushed to his feet and sure enough, his wolf was broad and muscled, vibrant power in a thick gray pelt.
He came over and touched muzzles with me, then sniffed along my back. I did the same, filling my nose with the scent ofLeeandWolfandPackmate.We might no longer have had the bond our Alpha carried between us, but that break hadn’t changed who we were to each other. When Lee yipped and whirled, bounding across the clearing, I moved with him, my shoulder inches from his hip. And we ran.
Wolves all run, in fur and in skin, each of us, all of us, as if in motion we find our place in the universe. Running alone was fine, but this? This was what we were made for— the softsimultaneous strike of paws on rock and soil and pine-needles, the easy whisper of matched breaths, the shift of straining muscles side by side, sharing sprints and leaps and turns in the clean, forest air. Pack bonds would lock us together mind-to-mind, but even without, this was joy. This was self.
We ran.
Nightfall found us miles from the truck. As the stars brightened overhead, Lee slowed from the ground-eating lope we’d settled into. I huffed a protest, but truthfully, I was ready to ease down. He stopped, letting me come up beside him, then swung his heavy head against me and nipped my shoulder.
I raised my head to the sky. A crescent moon had emerged from the treetops, bathing the conifer tips with silver light. Throwing back my head, I howled. At my side, Lee echoed me, his voice a note deeper.God, I’ve missed this.We sang together, pleasure and claiming and territorial possession, two wolves united in telling the world we were alive, and here, and in charge.
No voices answered us. This part of Wyoming had once housed wild wolves, but it’d been forty years since any were seen. In all my time in Yellowstone, I hadn’t scented any hint of them, and had seen severe overgrazing by the elk without their top predator. Well, humans were the inefficient but very top predator, of course.
Other than us. They didn’t know about us.
Satisfaction and a bit of anger on behalf of the wild wolves put a savage note in my next howl. Lee glanced at me but echoed my intent.Hear us. Fear us.
When we were done, total silence echoed. Birds and small creatures had understood and they hid, waiting for us to move on. Too bad humans were too thick in the head to do the same.
Although just as well for us. Humans outnumbered us tens of thousands to one. Not even the most arrogant wolf imaginedwe could beat them all, hence the prime directive. No human except a bonded female mate, mother to our pups, could know werewolves existed. We kept that secret on pain of death— sometimes our deaths, sometimes theirs. I could shout this anger to the skies, but around humans, we had to blend, to hide, to misdirect and falsify, and occasionally, to abduct and kill.
As I once did, in the war, betraying one oath for another…
Lee nudged me hard, unbalancing me, as if he knew where my thoughts had gone. A good reminder. The war had made killers of us all, wolf and human alike, for valid causes and bad ones. Nothing useful came of dwelling on those years.
I staggered, caught myself, and lunged back at Lee. We fell to wrestling, a play-fight where our vicious snarls and snapping teeth drew no blood. He put me on my back in the end, stiff-legged over me, his jaws on my throat in mockery of a death grip. I sagged in surrender and instead of moving off, he lay down on me, his weight pinning me to the earth. His fake bite changed to nuzzling under my jaw. I relaxed and let him have his fun.
Slowly, we gravitated to a pile of leaves and settled side by side, curled together. No doubt we should’ve run home, shifted, and gone back to our human life. But this was too perfect, too precious to end before we had to. So through the long hours of the night, we slept and woke, turning, touching at shoulders or hips, watching the moon cross the sky. Not until dawn was an hour off and the first light eased the blackness in the east did we rise, shake the leaves out of our fur, and head off to catch rabbits for breakfast before the long run home.
Chapter 3
