Red (2 page)

I missed the rugged and unforgiving terrain
of the Rockies. Not only because we blended in, but because it was
wild. Everything here was too low, too worn, too soft, too
civilized
. I hadn’t been anywhere near civilized since my
mother died.

The air pressed close, humidity draping over
me like a big soggy towel. A few more degrees and it would edge
into truly hot and sticky. East Tennessee felt like a world away
from home, where we were lucky if it got up to 70 as a high in the
dead of summer. And I was stuck here. Even if I went along with The
Plan and headed off to college in the fall, there would be
conditions. Rules. Restrictions.

Wolves don’t like restrictions.

Something moved to my left as I burst free
of a cluster of pines. A young buck. It spun away, springing toward
safety. Even on two feet, instinct demanded I give chase. I bounded
after it, pushing myself beyond human limits of agility and speed
to keep the powerful haunches in sight. My muscles ached, and the
pain helped to burn off some of the anger. By the time I lost the
deer at the river, I was somewhat calmer.

But it wasn’t enough. Nothing was ever
enough. Our kind require the tempering influence of mated pairs.
Two parents when we’re young and through transition. A mate when
we’re older. I was only a few months beyond my transition when Mom
was killed, enough in control that I wasn’t
technically
a
danger. At least not once the blood rage had passed. But I
certainly wasn’t winning Son of the Year awards.

Dad had let the farmer live. The
self-righteous, sanctimonious, son of a bitch who put a bullet
through my mother’s brain was still walking around, still
breathing. Fucking
lauded
for his actions. Because he, like
the rest of his ilk who head up the calls to “thin out” the number
of predators in the area in the name of “protecting” livestock, saw
a wolf, saw an opportunity, and took it. One shot. One shot that
should never have happened because Mom should have smelled the
farmer, seen it coming. Taken precautions. But she’d been careless.
Furious and careless because of a fight with my father. She’d gone
out for a run to blow off steam, as I often did, and she had
strayed where it wasn’t safe.

Maybe my father could have protected her.
Maybe he couldn’t. But as her mate, it sure as shit was his job to
avenge her. To rip the bastard to shreds.

He said that would make him into the monster
our kind is reputed to be in legend.

We weren’t so great with the agreeing to
disagree.

I didn’t know what I hoped to accomplish by
goading him. Provoking him to some kind of action that let me know
he was still an alpha male I could respect? Forcing his hand to go
back to Montana and do what needed to be done. Or maybe just
fueling the fury that was my constant companion. Anger was familiar
and in its own way comforting. It was so much easier to cope with
than the grief that threatened to swallow me whole.

The sun peeked over the ridge, burning off
the last of the morning mist. I wasn’t anywhere near a path I
recognized. My explorations of the Great Smoky Mountain National
Park hadn’t been too extensive in the month we’d been in Mortimer.
Our house was just at the edge of the Park proper, which made for
easy access—something I’d have to take more advantage of in the
future.

Rather than following my scent trail back, I
stuck to the river. Might as well start mapping the area. I'd gone
half a mile when I heard the hitched breath.  Veering away
from the river, I followed the sound into a copse of trees.

I stayed low to the ground and crept closer
until I could see who it was.

The girl perched on a huge flat boulder on
the opposite side of the clearing, her face raised to the sun so
that her long black hair fell in shiny waves down her back. She was
crying. Not that she was being noisy about it. She wasn’t
hysterical or red-faced and wailing. She was absolutely silent. I
caught the faint gleam of tears on her cheeks, saw her shoulders
shudder with the effort of holding in her grief. And it was grief.
I recognized the expression on her face as one I couldn’t bear
myself, and I wondered who she had lost.

Conscience pricked.
I should get out of
here. What kind of asshole sticks around and watches a girl
cry?
But something about her pulled at me, so I stayed. It was
as if her tears somehow released my own grief. I felt oddly soothed
by it. Part of me wanted to go to her and offer…what? Comfort? I
wasn’t any good at that. And she wouldn’t thank me for intruding.
No doubt she came out here for privacy.

Feeling like a voyeur, I started to back
away.

Spots of brighter sunlight flickered on her
face, and I paused, looking for the source of the reflection. My
eyes fell to her hands. The sun glinted off the blade of a knife
where it lay poised against her wrist. She took a deep, shaky
breath.

My heart jolted, a thunder of rage and
horror.
No!
I scrambled up, mustering every ounce of speed I
possessed to get to that knife. But my fastest wasn’t fast enough,
and the knife pressed into the white flesh.

~*~

Elodie

The knife was winning. Fear pulsed through
me in waves, radiating from the epicenter where the blade pressed
against my skin. I shook back my hair, trying to dislodge the
sticky strands from my neck. And I thought of my mother.

Had she wrestled with the decision like I
was? Or had she done it quickly? A vertical slash deep between the
tissue, straight to the artery. No going back. How long had it
taken her to bleed out? If they’d found her sooner, would she have
stood a chance?

My stomach roiled. My shoulders bucked.

If it came down to me facing off with death,
I wouldn’t be doing it like this. But by God I was going to face
down this knife and sit here until I got myself under control. I
heaved a breath and repositioned the knife, steadying my hold.

Something hit my hand, a hard and fast
strike that left my fingers stinging. I released the knife, my eyes
springing open.

What the hell—

“—
are you
doing?”

I didn’t register anything but the
tone—furious and threatening. Still drenched in fear from my bout
with the knife, I couldn’t think, couldn’t process. Some primitive
part of my brain urged me into motion, and I scrambled backward and
away, automatically looking around for a weapon before I even
identified the threat.

My eyes lit on my knife, embedded halfway to
the hilt in a flowering dogwood across the clearing. For a few
precious seconds, I just stared.

How…?

Then someone moved to my right, and I bolted
back in panic. My heart kicked hard in my chest. He was
huge
. A great beast of a boy with linebacker shoulders and
an expression of growling menace on his angular face. His hands
were held up in a placating gesture, but everything in his posture
screamed agitation and aggression. For every step I took in one
direction, he countered.

Trapped.

My brain screamed at me to move, escape. But
he was a good foot taller, with legs that would easily eat up any
lead I would gain by surprise if I ran. I found myself lifting my
head slightly and widening my nostrils to smell.

The stink of my own fear clouded everything
else. I inhaled again sifting through the scents with some deeper
part of my brain. Damp earth. Fresh cut green wood. And something
else I couldn’t identify.

The initial panic begin to ebb enough that I
started understanding what he was saying.

“
I’m not going to hurt
you.” That he snarled it in frustration didn’t lend a lot of
credence to the statement.

My breath was still coming fast and shallow.
“You’ll have to forgive me if I’m not inclined to believe you.”

“
I didn’t mean to scare
you, but I had to stop you.”

“
Stop me?” I asked
blankly.

“
I don’t care how bad
things are, that’s not the answer.”

“
What . . . ” Then I
stopped, my brain catching up with what he was saying. “I wasn’t
trying to kill myself.”

“
You’ll forgive me if I’m
not inclined to believe you.”

Having my words thrown back at me, I felt
the urge to curl my lip in a snarl. I glared instead.

“
What’s your name?” he
asked.

Did I look stupid? “You first.”

“
I’m—you’re
bleeding.”

While my brain struggled to make sense of
that, he sprang toward me, almost too fast to track. I tried to
stumble back, but he had my hand in his, tugging me toward him.

“
Hey!”

Then he pressed the tail of his t-shirt
against the cut on my arm that I hadn’t even noticed yet. His touch
was firm but careful. The anger seemed to leech out of him,
redirected into action.

I said the first thing that popped into my
head. “You cut me!”

His face darkened again. “
I
cut you?
I just stopped you from slitting your wrists. I saved your
life.”

My own temper started to emerge now that I
was relatively sure he wasn’t planning to kill me. “I wasn’t
slitting my wrists. You yanking it away from me nicked my
vein.”

“
Not slitting your wrists.
Oh, because there are so many
other
completely logical
reasons for you to be out in the middle of nowhere
with a
knife
, crying your heart out.”

Had I been crying? I lifted my free hand to
my face and found it wet. God, how mortifying. Then I stopped
myself. This lunatic thought I was out here committing suicide and
I was worried that he’d seen me crying?
Get your priorities
straight, girl.

“
It’s none of your damned
business what I was doing, but I wasn’t trying to kill
myself.”

“
Right.”

I glared at him but made no additional
reply. He would either believe me or not. Repeating myself probably
wouldn’t help my case.

His long fingers were still curled around my
wrist, keeping me immobilized, but oddly gentle in contrast to the
storms in his eyes. It felt almost comforting. Which was just
stupid given that he was some pissed off, misguided, wannabe hero.
Still, my pulse slowed, my breathing evened out, and the fear of
the knife finally ebbed. For better or worse, the trial was
over.

He seemed to calm too as we stood there in
awkward silence, him holding my wrist and staunching the bleeding.
Whatever demons haunted him retreated so that, when he looked up at
me, his face was no longer menacing. It was just heartbreakingly
sad, marked by the kind of loss that scars a person. I knew it
because I saw the same expression in the mirror every day.

My fingers itched to touch his cheek and
smooth those worry lines away.

What the hell is wrong with me?
I
curled them into a fist instead and frowned.

He lifted the edge of the t-shirt, now
stained with a darker spot on the black. “I think it’s starting to
clot.” Working quickly, he ripped two clean strips off the bottom
of the t-shirt. He folded one and pressed it to the cut and wrapped
the other around my wrist to secure it. “Doesn’t look like you’ll
need stitches.”

My wrist felt suddenly cold without the
pressure of his hand around it.

I am losing my mind.

I folded my injured arm across my chest and
looked up at him. “Thank you,” I said, though I didn’t really know
for what.

His eyes followed me as I moved back to the
boulder, snagging the notebook and stuffing it in my bag. I picked
up the leather sheath and looked at the knife buried in the tree.
“How did you do that?”

His shoulders jerked in a motion that was
half discomfort, half shrug. “Lucky shot. I can try to get it out
if you want.”

I lifted a brow at that. “Aren’t you worried
I’ll use it?”

“
Will you?”

“
Not like that.”

I guess he believed me because he crossed
the clearing and reached up, wiggling the blade free of the tree.
Then he walked back and presented it to me hilt first. “Be
careful.”

“
Always.” I slid the knife
back into its sheath and slipped it into my bag. “Look, I need to
go—” I trailed off, turning a fast circle.

The boy wasn’t there.

I stood and listened for sounds of his
passage. I heard nothing. Lifting my head and inhaling, I tried to
find his scent. But other than a lingering trace of boy and sweat
and that thing I couldn’t place, there was nothing but the tangle
of green and dirt that was summer in the mountains.

Gooseflesh broke out along my arms, despite
the rising summer heat.

He was simply gone. Vanished into the woods
he’d come from. Like a ghost.

Chapter 2

Elodie

I
woke in the pearl gray light of
dawn, my head still reeling from dreams of the ghost boy. I rolled
over to turn off the alarm that would blare in twenty minutes and
saw the scrap of t-shirt on my nightstand. Not a dream. Or rather,
not
just
a dream.

I flopped onto my back and ran my fingers
lightly over the clean bandage I’d applied the day before. It
didn’t hurt anymore. Carefully, I peeled up the edge of the First
Aid tape and peeked. There was an odd sort of relief in seeing the
thin, angry scab still stretched across my wrist. Accelerated
healing was one of the signs of the change. After the bacon fiasco,
I half expected things to start happening wham, bang, one after
another even though I knew it should take more time.

The house was silent, a state of affairs I
was becoming more and more accustomed to these days. As a
firefighter, my father worked multi-day shifts on duty, staying at
the fire station. When I was little, back when we lived in Texas, I
had my own cot at the station and a platoon of unofficial uncles
among the other firefighters. Since we moved here and I hit high
school, that had stopped. Dad had gotten more comfortable with
leaving me alone at the house. Or maybe he just wanted to get away
from me. It was hard to tell. Either way, I was well-trained enough
in The Rules that he knew I wasn’t going to go do something that
would get me noticed.