Quest (Shifter Island Book 4) (11 page)

Sure, she’d seen dozens of women run in high heels—in the movies and on TV. The shoes never seemed to create a problem when all those actresses ran after bad guys, or away from bad guys.

But now?

In real life?

It was all she could do to keep from stumbling and falling flat on her face on the pavement. That would have capped off her experience with this stupid yellow dress—tearing it to shreds on the road, maybe skinning her knees, twisting an ankle, bleeding all over the place. So, maybe a quarter of a mile down the road from the reception hall, she took her shoes off again and hurled them into the bushes. Running barefoot wasn’t going to be a treat either, but she could deal with it. She’d make herself deal with it.

Okay, so maybe she wouldn’t run. She’d just walk.

She was all too aware of how bizarre she looked, trudging along at the edge of the road in this ugly fancy dress, barefoot, with her no longer nicely coiffed hair now hanging limply over her shoulders. She tried to ignore the people who did double-takes as they drove past her, keeping her head down, her eyes on where she was walking, watching out for broken glass.

Her head felt like it was full of broken glass.

“Allison.”

Great. Exactly the voice she didn’t want to hear. She ignored him, too, and kept walking.

“Allison, please stop.”

“Go away, Luca.”

“I don’t believe anyone was badly hurt. Everything is quiet now.”

“Is it?”

He circled around in front of her and blocked her path. For a moment she thought about trying to duck around him, but he didn’t look like he intended to let her do that—at least not until after he’d spoken his piece.

“No one was badly hurt,” he said again.

“No? How do you figure that? Because no one’s bleeding to death? There are people on the
ground
back there, Luca. Julie was afraid I’d ruin her wedding by not showing up, but it wasn’t me. I saw what was going on. It was all the men. The whole bunch of them, fighting over who gets to be the alpha male.”

That made him shrink back a little. Then he said, “Julie is still married. And the disruption—”

“It was a free-for-all. With you right there in the middle of it.”

“Those men are all under the influence of strong drink. They likely would have disrupted the party in some other way if I hadn’t been there. Should I pretend I didn’t hear them making rude comments about your friend? The one who has larger breasts than the others.”

Donna Marie, Allison realized.

Yes, she’d caught a glimpse of two of the groomsmen making gestures to each other, hand signals that made clear what they’d like to do with Donna. It was awful, but harmless, she’d figured; the usual lame, middle-school crap guys pulled with each other when they’d had a few drinks. When they were sober, they both seemed pretty timid around women.

“I’m going back to the motel,” she told Luca as calmly as she could manage. “I’m going to take a shower and change my clothes. Then I’m going to check out, go to the airport and change my plane ticket. With luck, I can be home by breakfast time tomorrow.”

“You won’t be able to walk all the way there without shoes.”

“I’ll manage.”

I never wanted to come all the way out here in the first place,
she thought, but that still wasn’t true. She’d wanted very much to share Julie’s special day. She’d wanted to see the old neighborhood, and spend some time laughing and relaxing with old friends.

She’d wanted all of this to be a normal visit, something she’d remember fondly. Now it felt like something she’d remember as fondly as a root canal, or that time her septic system had backed up in the middle of the night. There didn’t seem to be any part of this trip that was special, that she could…

She stalked around Luca and kept going.

For a minute or two, it didn’t seem like he was following her. She resisted the urge to look back over her shoulder, so she couldn’t be sure, but she couldn’t hear any rapid footsteps coming her way, and he didn’t call out to her.

She stepped off into the grass at the side of the road for a minute to let a couple of cars go by, then kept going, pointedly ignoring the woman in the silver SUV who stopped to call out, “Are you okay?”

The runaway bridesmaid
, she thought. More than likely, a couple of people had taken pictures of her with their phones before they drove away.

You’ll be home soon. Just… keep going.

She began to chant a mantra in her head: Shower. Change. Check out. Airport. Home.

Shower. Change. Check out. Airport…

Home.

Finally, there was the motel up ahead, a few hundred yards away. Not wanting to attract any more attention than she was already getting, she kept up a steady pace but didn’t power-walk, didn’t run. She did her best to act as if all of this was perfectly normal, that there was nothing at all about her that was worth looking at. With her head now held high, she strode across the motel parking lot toward her room.

Shower. Change…

“Allison.”

He was alongside her all of a sudden, then in front of her, walking backwards so he could face her.

“I need to go,” she told him.

He pulled in a deep breath, one that swelled his chest so much that it seemed like his ribs might burst.
He keeps doing that,
she thought disjointedly.
Getting bigger. Stronger.
And, damn him, he was wearing shoes. He’d gotten here without a problem, and the bottoms of her feet were probably a mess.

“I can’t stay here any longer, Luca,” she said. “I thought I wanted to be here, but I was wrong.”

There were people nearby: a woman sitting in a plastic chair outside the door of her room, talking on her phone, and a couple of teenagers hanging around near the pool. The woman was pretending not to look, but the kids were openly staring and making remarks to each other. The motel office was only a dozen yards away; no doubt Allison and Luca were visible from there too. The desk clerk was probably watching them as well.

She tried to take a step forward. To her relief, Luca got out of her way. But when she reached the door of her room, she realized she had left her purse at the country club, and her rented car was at Julie’s mother’s house.

That was really, finally, enough. Tears began to pour down her cheeks.

Within seconds, Luca—who had his own key to the room—had opened the door and ushered her inside. Around deep, gulping sobs she told him about the purse and the car. Then she collapsed onto the bed and buried her face in the dusty-smelling duvet so she could weep without looking at anything.

She heard the door open and close, but she ignored it. What seemed like a few minutes later—five? ten?—it opened and closed again.

Luca touched the back of her hand and said softly, “Here.”

She turned her head to look. Her purse was lying on the bed next to her hand.

“I couldn’t fetch the car,” he said apologetically. “I don’t know how to drive, and I was afraid I would be stopped by the police if I tried.”

He stepped away again, long enough to run a cup of water for her. Breathing in noisy gulps, she sat up on the bed, accepted the cup from him with a nod, and sipped the water down.

She could see herself in the mirror over the dresser. Her makeup was smeared all over her face.

Luca took the cup from her and filled it again. She took a couple of sips, then handed it back to him, and he set it aside on the night table. He seemed to want to gather her into his arms, and she thought she might like that, but he kept his distance. Close, but not too close.

“Where is this place?” he asked softly.

“What place?”

“Your home. In the mountains. Tell me about it.”

His voice was so gentle—like that of a loving parent trying to soothe a distraught child. She needed that more than the embrace, she decided, and far more than she needed to make love again.

It had been months since she’d seen her parents, and weeks since she’d talked to them. They lived only a little more than an hour’s drive from here, but that seemed like the distance between galaxies.

And home… her little house…

“Will you tell me?” Luca asked.

She blinked at him, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. That only made the makeup situation worse. He noticed—he couldn’t help but notice—and he had a hard time holding back a grin.

“I love it there,” she told him.

“Why is that?”

“It just feels… right. Does that make sense? When I’m there, I feel like I’m in the right place. Like I was always supposed to be there.”

“It’s your home, then. Truly your home? Your home isn’t with your family? It’s in this other place?”

He sounded a little lost, as if he’d woken up from a deep sleep to discover that someone he cared about very much had died suddenly, while he was sleeping. Their relationship, she supposed. His last hope of convincing her to go back to that island with him.

“I’m sorry, Luca,” she said.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Yes. It’s my home now. I love it there. I… I can stand outside at night and see more stars that I ever imagined were up there. It opens my imagination. Can you understand that? I can see the whole universe from my front yard.”

For a moment, he didn’t say anything.

Then he whispered, “I see it in your eyes.”

If he hadn’t seemed so completely lost, that would have sounded like the cheesiest line ever, something out of a really awful movie. He held her gaze for a moment, then picked up her hand and held it between both of his.

“I… I would like to see this place,” he said.

He hadn’t made that offer before—not this firmly, at least. There was no hesitation in his voice, no suggestion that he’d back out at the last minute, the way she had over and over again during these past few days.

“You would?” she asked.

“Because it means so much to you.”

Warmth began to spread through her. She’d felt something like it before—with him; always with him—but this was different. This wasn’t the rush of sexual attraction, the need to have him close to her, inside her; this was something that wrapped her up and held her, safe, protected, loved. It puzzled her at first, because it was new, and she was tempted to slip away into the bathroom so she could think about it, the way she always examined a new project at work, or where she might put a new keepsake in her house so it would get the right amount of attention.

Then she realized that she didn’t need to think about it, any more than she needed to think about the existence of all those stars in the sky.

Maybe, she thought, this was what Helene and Russell had. This warmth. This sense of safety.

This sense of sacrifice for the other.

Slowly, he let go of her hand. Then he stepped back from the bed and took a deep breath, one that seemed to flood through his entire body.

For a second, he seemed to be both there and not there, and she realized that the wolf was just beneath the surface.

Moving slowly and deliberately, he stripped off his shirt, then pushed off his shoes. His pants came off a little more quickly.

This time, the transformation seemed exquisitely painful, each bit of it a terrible strain on his body.

When the change was finished, the wolf tipped its head back and howled mournfully at the ceiling, a long, reverberating song that came close to breaking her heart.

Then, just as painfully, he changed back.

“Tell me,” he said when he was human again. “Is there room for me in that place? If the answer is no, I’ll go away. I’ll leave you, like I did before—but this time, I won’t come back.”

He looked small now. Very vulnerable.

Luca. The man who’d come all the way back here, away from his family and the place he dearly loved… for her.

The man who’d called to her until she answered.

“Of course there’s room,” she told him. “There’ll always be room.”

It was the worst journey of his life.

For much of it, he could barely breathe, although he told himself over and over—and told the wolf as firmly as he could—that he was in no danger. But being confined inside the car was suffocating, and with other cars and what seemed like thousands of very massive trucks speeding by on either side of them, it seemed as if he could die suddenly and painfully at any moment.

But Allison not only seemed calm, she seemed happy.

She smiled at him frequently, and often reached over to touch him, squeezing his hand in her own or brushing his cheek with the backs of her fingers. She seemed to take great pleasure in searching for songs on the radio, and sang along with the ones she liked.

Originally, she had planned to go back to her home in the mountains in an airplane, but everything inside him had told him that that was a terrible idea. He had no idea how the wolf would react to being held captive inside a metal tube a mile above the ground, packed in among strange humans. If the wolf panicked beyond Luca’s ability to control it, there was no telling what would happen.

So, bit by bit, he’d told Allison that he could not fly. Wolves simply were not meant to fly.

He’d thought she’d tell him that humans weren’t meant to fly, either; instead, she told him that she would trade in her plane ticket and would arrange to drive her rented car all the way home. She wouldn’t mind that, she said; she wasn’t due home until late Tuesday, and this would give them both a chance to enjoy the scenery along the way.

It would take two days, she said. They would stop overnight when they were halfway to the mountains.

Now, they were passing what looked like a small town when she said, “Penny for your thoughts.”

He wasn’t sure he could speak, but he managed to say, “What?”

“What are you thinking about?”

A large, dark-colored car flew past them on Luca’s side. There were children in the back seat, he noticed. Two of them, it looked like. The father, who was driving, seemed not to know they were there.

How could he put his children in danger like this?

“So fast,” he muttered.

“Hmm,” Allison said. “He’s got to be doing at least eighty. And he’s in the slow lane, for crying out loud. I hope the troopers have an eye out. Hey, are you getting hungry? There’s a rest stop coming up.”

Rest?
Luca thought. Yes, rest would be good. It would give him a chance to slow down his thundering heart.

“Yes,” he said.

A couple of minutes later, Allison pulled off the highway, headed toward a large building with a sign identifying it as
North Carlton Rest Stop
. A lot of cars were parked there, and perhaps a dozen of those massive trucks. People were walking into and out of the building, some of them carrying paper bags of food—he could tell by the smell—and cups of liquid. Many of them looked tired, and a few of them looked angry. One man was yelling at a cell phone as he walked.

“This doesn’t look particularly restful,” Luca said, mostly to himself.

“I guess not,” Allison agreed. “But look—there are picnic tables over there. We can eat outside.”

She hopped out of the car and wiggled her arms and legs. To stretch them, Luca supposed. She’d been sitting in the same position for an awfully long time.

And so had he.

He pushed the door on his side open and got out slowly, feeling as if he’d been jailed for several days and wondering if his limbs would cooperate—and if the wolf was upset enough to break free and bolt off into the field behind the rest stop. It had been quiet for the last half hour or so, but now that Luca wasn’t confined inside a rapidly moving car, it might take advantage of this relative freedom.

He was a little alarmed to realize that the animal was cowering.

“I need to run to the little girls’ room,” Allison said. “I’ll meet you in the food court?”

“If—” he started, but she was already hurrying away.

He knew from their time together four years ago that “little girls’ room” meant the toilet room, something he supposed would be easy to find, even in a place like this. He watched her disappear inside the building, then turned to examine the car. Allison had closed the door on her side, so he did the same.

“You gonna move, pal?” said a strange voice.

It was a man who was trying to get into the car parked next to theirs. Nodding an apology, Luca moved out of the way, only to receive a muttered string of curses for his troubles. The man dropped into the driver’s seat of his car like a sack of potatoes, started the engine and sent the car hurtling ahead, with little attention given to the people who were walking nearby.

Rest? Luca thought again. There was no rest to be had in a place like this—and it seemed that that fool Gary wasn’t alone in his ferocious desire to defend his car from someone who was simply standing nearby.

He started moving slowly toward the building, trying to look calm and relaxed, reminding himself that by human standards this area really wasn’t crowded. He’d seen videos of sports events, and concerts, and New Year’s Eve, where the humans were jammed so tightly together it was a wonder they could breathe. Here, there was plenty of air. Plenty of space to move around in, even though a lot of the humans were so focused on their cell phones, their children, or something going on inside their own heads that they bumped into each other frequently. It made them look like they were sleepwalking, or under the influence of strong drink.

Or a curse.

To his surprise, as he approached the door, a man stepped back and held it open for him.

“Thank you,” he murmured.

The man went away without responding.

Inside, he did quickly spot the sign for the toilet rooms, although he didn’t really need that; the smell would have pointed him in the right direction. Rather than venture in there, he wandered toward the entrance of the gift shop, marveling at the colorful selection of goods—none of which seemed particular useful. Most of it looked cheaply made, likely to fall apart within a short time.

Souvenirs
, said a sign overhead.

He’d bought a few things of this kind near the end of his Involvement: small toys for the children of the pack to share, carved wooden boxes for his father and brother, and a soft, bright-colored scarf for his mother. Now, he had no idea what had happened to any of it. Had it all been lost? Ruined somehow?

He supposed it didn’t matter. He couldn’t allow it to matter.

“Mister,” said a voice.

He looked down to see a small boy peering up at a shelf of snack foods. He knew that too much interaction with a child could get him into trouble, so he moved away a little, guessing that he was in the boy’s way.

“I can’t reach it,” the boy told him. Then he pointed to the top shelf, to a row of big purple-and-yellow bags of something called Cheezy Chips.

They were certainly nothing a child—or anyone else—really ought to be eating, but Luca plucked a bag off the shelf and handed it to the boy, who grinned in gratitude and ran off around a corner with his treasure clutched to his chest.

“New friend?”

Allison. Thank the gods.

“I’m useful for reaching up high,” Luca said mildly.

“And other things,” she said with a teasing light in her eyes. It didn’t fade as she laced her fingers with his and leaned against him. “Do you want some lunch, or are you sticking with Cheezy Chips?”

“Lunch, please.”

The food court was a collection of bad choices and bad odors. Individually, the offerings might have been almost pleasant to smell, but blended together they produced a nasty, stomach-churning soup. Burgers and fries. Chinese food. Fish. Donuts. Pizza. All of it overlaid with the sharp tang of cleansers and urine. The noise was awful, too; the high ceiling amplified everything and turned it into a din that made Luca want to clamp his hands over his ears.

“We can eat outside,” Allison reminded him.

She bought a triple-decker burger for him and a salad for herself. Cookies for dessert, water to drink. She gave him the bags to carry, wrapped her arm around his waist, and steered him toward the big entrance doors.

They had to weave around a number of people—most of them talking on cell phones—on the way out, making their departure seem like a sort of contest. Then they were outside again, breathing the relatively fresh air.

“You look a little glazed,” Allison said.

He supposed he did. “There?” he suggested, nodding toward a picnic table shaded by a row of trees.

The whole time they were eating, his attention kept drifting off into the distance: to that big field, to the trees, to the relative silence he knew he would find there. The better smells. The presence of animals. There would be something like that near Allison’s home, he told himself firmly. There would be a place he could go to relax—it was clearly visible in the pictures she had shown him on her computer.

But could he truly endure living with humans? In Colorado, the place he had always been taught to dread?

Could he…

He set what was left of the burger down on the paper it had been wrapped in. It was all right; it was somewhat overcooked and, like most human foods, far too salty, but drinking from the big bottle of water had helped it go down easily. When he lifted his hand away from it, he saw that his fingers were trembling.

The bond was supposed to be a good thing. Wasn’t it?

Wasn’t a bond the gods telling a wolf that this was the path he was supposed to take?

That was what he’d always been told. By the elders, by his parents, by his brother… Even himself.

But each minute that passed said that that was a lie.

That he was making a terrible mistake.