Page 1 of All These Years
Chapter 1
Lee
Highcrest, Wyoming. May 1960.
.
Werewolf!The familiar musk hit my senses like sunshine after two decades in a dark cave, blinding, painful, wonderful. I froze in the doorway to the sheriff’s office, fighting the urge to flare my human nostrils and inhale that scent. It’d been years since I’d encountered one of my kind, and this was not just any werewolf.
Micah.That male sweat with the touch of wolf was subtly different from the scent of the boy I remembered, and yet it arrowed deep into my walled-off heart andtugged.
“…do you?” Sheriff Tomlinson had clearly asked me a question, but I couldn’t dredge his words out of my shocked brain.
“Sorry. Say that again.”
“You’re not taking this seriously, are you, Lee?”
“I’m taking it very seriously. Chuck wants to run me out of town.” But despite my words, I was distracted, trying to subtly inhale those traces of Micah in this small room.Why? Where is he?
“Now, now, Lee. Have a seat.” Tomlinson dropped his considerable bulk into the wooden chair behind his desk, which creaked in protest.
I sat opposite and forced my attention back to the sheriff.
He tried to plaster a benevolent look on his face. The effort was less than convincing. “Chuck’s voiced a concern, and you know I have to follow up.”
No, you don’t.Chuck Fletcher had voiced multiple “concerns” in the last three months, since he’d realized that not only did his dog hate me— normal for a dog encountering a werewolf— but his wife, on the other hand, kept calling back a guy with my physique to do chores around the place. It’d taken me till my last job for her to realize his true problem with me. I noticed people, but I didn’t really noticewomen.
“What was it this time?” I asked. “The smell of my pet weasel driving his dog crazy again?”
I hadn’t planned to have a pet, ever, but finding Zipper as a tiny baby and raising him to live in my house had turned out to be a great excuse for why dogs all growled at me. Animals generally found werewolves unsettling and scary. Those hand-raised by us from birth were the only exceptions. Dog owners tended to take their pets’ reactions badly, and Zipper was a useful explanation.
The sheriff frowned. “Chuck says you stole something from his house.”
I grimaced and ran a hand over my face. “He’s scraping the bottom of the barrel for excuses now. Come on, Sheriff, you know me. I’ve been in and out of people’s houses for the last ten years, doing odd jobs. If I was a thief, you’d have figured that out by now.”
“I still need your permission to search your house. No big deal. If the item isn’t there, you’re in the clear.”
“No.” I sat up straight. “Sorry, Sheriff, but no. A man’s house is his castle, and you need a warrant to search mine.” I didn’t know what a thorough search might turn up that would look weird, but a forty-five-year-old man who looked fifteen years younger and turned furry at will might leave traces of that double life in his home. I never had anyone over visiting, and I had a good lock on my door, so I hadn’t been meticulous about evidence in my private space.
“Are you going to make this difficult?” Tomlinson’s frown deepened.
“Why should I roll over for Chuck? If I sayhestolemywallet when I was there and refused to give it back, would you search his house?”
“Are you putting in a formal complaint?”
“No, because I’m not a lying knucklehead like Chuck.” I pushed to my feet. “Look, Sheriff, you know he hates me, and I figured out it’s because his wife doesn’t. Which is none of my business— I’ll stop saying yes when she calls for a handyman. But you know, if you want to investigate a crime, you might look into how he beats her.” The shadowed bruises on her arms were the reason I’d given in to her entreaties the last time, even after I’d vowed to avoid the Fletcher house.
“If she files a complaint, I’ll do that.”
Which meant Tomlinson knew and couldn’t be bothered. Too bad that jerk Chuck wasn’t a werewolf. For abusing his wife, he’d end up dragged off by his Alpha and dropped down a deep hole. I was the last person to applaud pack “justice,” but it was an effective end to wife beating. Unless the abuser was the Alpha, of course… I dragged my mind back from dark places. “It’s 1960, you know. Women aren’t property. You should let her know she’d be protected if she leaves him.”
Tomlinson was already shaking his head. “I’m not encouraging a wife to leave her lawful husband. What kind of sheriff do you take me for?”
A bad one?That wasn’t fair, but the scent of Micah in my nose— and brain and heart— was making me rebellious. “The kind who wants to stop a murder before it happens?”
“Now, now. Chuck’s a bit impulsive, and I admit he’s hard on Peggy, but he’s not going to hurt her.”
I didn’t snort in disbelief, but it was a near thing. “Let me know if you get that warrant for my house. Or if you want to save yourself useless work, you could just tell Chuck no.” I stood, debating how to address the Micah-scent. “Uh, on a different note, I heard there’s a stranger in town.”
