Red (27 page)

I was so proud for not jolting.

When I met Sawyer’s eyes, his glowed gold.
His lips curved. I found myself grinning in response. When he bowed
and made an
after you
gesture, I continued stalking forward.
We flanked the elk’s position, and glancing at Sawyer, I realized
the game was to see how close we could get.

Twenty feet. The elk grazed between the
trees, unconcerned with what was going on around it.

Fifteen. Something small screamed and was
silent, captured in the talons of a hawk. The elk, a male, lifted
its head, antlers casting shadows in the midday sun.

Ten. The elk turned to look right at me. I
froze, captivated by those deep, liquid eyes. I wondered if it
would challenge. Then the wind shifted, taking with it my scent,
the scent of predator, and the elk whirled, springing into
motion.

The game shifted, no longer about silence,
now about speed. I didn’t pause to see if Sawyer followed. I knew
he did.

The elk tore through the trees and down the
slope. Without the wolf, I’m sure I’d have fallen. But I was
sure-footed as I ran, despite the lack of trail and the presence of
rocks. I’d always had good balance, but this, this was amazing. My
muscles screamed as I pushed myself faster after it, and I grinned
in fierce triumph.

Sawyer shot ahead of me, toward the elk’s
right flank, driving it in the opposite direction. Its hooves
slipped on rock and we nearly caught it before it gained purchase
and scrambled into the pass. The sound of its breath was like a
bellows, pumping air in and out of its panicked lungs. My own
breath was coming fast, but not yet painful. I still had reserves
of energy. In some part of my brain I recognized that we could run
this elk to exhaustion.

And then what?

My steps faltered.

Something in me tightened, a growl building
in my chest.

No.

But the denial was distant, and I knew I
wasn’t fully in control. My speed built, my strides
lengthening.

NO.

I finally understood what Sawyer meant when
he described the wolf as separate because mine wasn’t willing to
relinquish control. I could
feel
her fighting me. She
wanted
that elk,
wanted
the chase. She wanted to take
it down.

NO!

I mentally yanked back, almost as if hauling
back on a choke chain. The wolf jerked in the opposite direction
and I lost my balance going down in a skid. I barely felt the
abrasions on my skin because my body was cramping again. Muscles
bucked and writhed. I felt my hips crack and realign and let out a
scream.

“
Breathe.” Sawyer snapped
out the order in a calm voice.

I tried but my chest cavity expanded with a
sickening crunch, and the pain drove the air from my lungs.

“
Look at me.”

Was he crazy? I couldn’t look. If I opened
my eyes, they would pop right out of my head from the pressure.

“
Look at me.”

I managed to force my eyes open. Sawyer
crouched in front of me, right at my level and fixed his eyes—his
wolf’s eyes—on mine. It was a dominant stare, one that my wolf
didn’t like one bit.

“
Let go.”

I snarled at him, though I didn’t know if he
was telling me to give into the wolf or the wolf to give in to
me.

“
Let go,” he
repeated.

Focusing on his eyes distracted me from the
pain. A little.

“
Breathe for me now. In.
Out.”

I concentrated on taking air in to my newly
expanded lungs. On blowing it out. In. Out.

“
Try to relax.”

He might as well have said,
Try to
fly.
But I kept breathing. Kept watching him. And muscle by
muscle tried to unclench my body.

It hurt like a son of a bitch.

I could tell muscles and bones weren’t their
proper length but caught somewhere in between. I didn’t even want
to think about what I looked like right now. I just focused on
Sawyer’s eyes and tried to ride it out using some kind of
bastardized progressive muscle relaxation technique.

I don’t even know at what point it was over.
Eventually I just lay on the ground, trembling with fatigue and
twitching with aftershocks of pain.

Sawyer laid his hand over mine. “Does it
hurt when I touch you?”

I made an incoherent noise in the
negative.

“
I’m going to carry you
back to camp.”

Another noise. Affirmative.

Carefully, Sawyer scooped me up. The
blinding pain in my head wasn’t quite so bad tucked against his
chest, so I curled closer.

“
It’s gonna be okay,” he
said. “Transition’s close. It won’t hurt so bad when you don’t get
stuck.”

“
She . . . ” I cut myself
off when my voice came out like a crow’s. Apparently my vocal
chords were just shredded. “She fought me.”

“
Your wolf wanted one
thing, you wanted another. You did well up to that point. Your
stealth is improving and you kept up beautifully during the chase.
She was closer to the surface then and wanted to push
you.”

I shuddered.

“
What happens if she wins?”
I rasped.

“
It’s not a contest. You
have to accept your wolf as part of who you are.”

“
But when she’s ascendant,
I don’t feel like I’m in control. I don’t feel like I’m the one
making the decisions.”

“
It’s still you. Just not a
part of you that you’re used to feeling.”

I thought about that for a bit as he strode
back the way we’d come. He carried me so easily, despite the all
out sprint we’d done for the last couple of miles. My whole body
seemed to have the muscle tension of limp spaghetti after the
partial shift. That’s what it had been. I’d been caught halfway
between two forms. I wondered if anybody ever got stuck permanently
in between and shuddered again at the thought. No, that was a fate
worse than fully shifting, worse than letting the wolf be in full
control. Wasn’t it?

“
But what . . . what if the
wolf wants to do something horrible?”

“
Like killing something?”
he asked.

“
Or someone,” I
whispered.

Sawyer was quiet for a bit. “I’m not going
to lie and say the instinct isn’t there. It is. Your wolf’s primary
drive is your survival. If you feel threatened, she’ll come forward
and try to protect you the only way she knows how. And sometimes
you have to let her because the human side just gets in the
way.”

I didn’t know which I was more afraid of.
The idea of losing control to the animal. Or the idea that I
wouldn’t be able to when I needed to most.

~*~

Elodie

“
Let’s take a break,” said
Sawyer.

“
Again
? We just
stopped an hour ago.”

“
You should have some
jerky.”

“
I just had trail mix at
the last stop,” I grumbled. Since he’d managed to get oatmeal down
me back at camp, he’d been foisting food on me every hour or
so.

“
Werewolves have much
faster metabolisms. You have to keep refueling.”

He handed me the jerky. I glared at him but
tore open the bag and started chewing, more because it seemed to
make the strain around his eyes ease a little than because I was
hungry. In truth, my stomach was still pretty raw and unsettled
after the partial shift this morning. My strength had mostly
returned, but I wasn’t at all as steady on my feet as I was
accustomed and my wolf and I were still wary with each other.

Sawyer was worried. It seemed almost nothing
of my transition was going normally. He hadn’t said anything about
it directly, and I knew that was meant to keep my own anxiety down.
But I was learning to read him. He was covering up his fear with
this mother hen routine, doing the only things he knew how. But he
wasn’t pushing me to go back, to consult with his dad. Probably
because his dad wasn’t likely to have any answers either. Because I
and my family line were freaks even among werewolf kind. I wasn’t
sure how to feel about that. But I was less scared knowing all my
ancestors had survived this part. None of them had died in
transition. The problems all came afterward.

Since we were stopped, I pulled out the map
and checked our location. We were at least two hours behind where I
wanted us to be. I wanted to get to Kennicott Ridge tonight. At
this point, that meant we’d be hiking after dark. Sawyer would
probably fight me on that. But I felt this inexplicable sense of
urgency about the whole situation. As if we didn’t manage to find
the cabin soon, it would all be too late. I couldn’t peg down
why
.

There was no evidence so far that we were
being tracked or followed. If Dad had done as he’d promised and
passed around the cover story, then no one should even realize I
was gone. Except probably the hunter, who shouldn’t be able to pick
up my trail. I guess maybe in the back of my mind, I felt like the
longer it took us to find the cabin the more likely any traces of
the kidnapper would disappear. As if a month wasn’t already enough
time for that to have happened. I just . . . needed to keep
moving.

I folded and put away the map. “Let’s
go.”

Sawyer opened his mouth to protest again,
but I skewered him with a look and he closed it again.

We continued to pick our way upstream,
sometimes being forced by terrain to leave the bank but always
coming back and following the sound of flowing water. The country
was wilder here, certainly not groomed for easy hiking. The heat
was oppressive, the sun beating down, making us sweat. Yet I was
cold. It got worse as the day grew later, until I could hardly hold
back the shiver.

“
What’s wrong? You’re
scowling,” said Sawyer.

I wasn’t scowling. I was gritting my teeth
to keep them from chattering.

“
Nothing.”

“
Haven’t I told you you’re
a lousy liar?” Sawyer grabbed me by the arm and put a hand to my
cheek. “You’re burning up!”

“
Actually, I’m pretty sure
I’m freezing. It’s fine. It’ll pass.” I wanted to lean into the
warmth of his hand, curl into the heat I knew his body would
promise because right that moment I didn’t feel like I’d ever be
warm again. I could call it quits, ask to camp. He’d absolutely
agree. But then we’d lose another day.

“
You’re pushing yourself
too hard. You need to rest,” he said, tugging me closer.

The embrace was awkward because of our
packs, but I still snuggled in, laying my head against his chest,
wanting to just lounge there like a lizard on a sun-warmed rock. “I
need answers. I can rest when I’m dead.”

He stiffened.

“
Okay that totally came out
wrong. Black humor. Sorry.” I pulled back and caught a glint of
something in the setting sun. “What’s that?”

“
What’s what?”

I pushed around him to get a better look. It
was so covered in vines and saplings that I could hardly make it
out, but I smiled in triumph. “A window.”

“
It might not be
it.”

“
But it might be.
C’mon.”

We picked our way across the creek and up
the other bank. The cabin was nestled high on the ridge with little
more than a deer track leading up to it from the water. If the sun
hadn’t caught that lone bit of window, I doubt I’d ever have
noticed it. Kudzu swarmed up the walls and swallowed the roof,
which seemed to be some kind of corrugated metal, maybe tin. As we
circled the structure, looking for the door, Sawyer began whistling
the theme from
Deliverance,
which might have been funny if
we weren’t looking for a kidnapper’s lair. Not that this place
ranked high on the Supervillain Lair Scale. I was guessing maybe it
used to be a trapper’s cabin.

The door was as covered in vines as the rest
of the building. I started to reach for the rusty iron knob, but
Sawyer stopped me.

“
I’ll go first,” he said
softly.

“
Oh, because your whistling
didn’t give it away that we’re out here?” I whispered.

He just waved me back. I rolled my eyes, but
let him have his way. A door that old, that dilapidated should have
screeched on rusty hinges. It didn’t. When he twisted the knob and
shoved, it swung open with barely a whisper. The entry was so low
and narrow, Sawyer had to stoop and twist sideways to go inside.
Naturally I could walk straight in. Sometimes being vertically
challenged isn’t a curse.

The room was maybe ten feet by ten feet,
with a line of crumbling stones down one wall that ended in a
rubble pile that used to be a hearth. Other than the detritus of
the chimney, the rest of the room was strangely clean. It was
entirely bare of furniture. I slipped off my pack and set it beside
Sawyer’s, then wrapped my arms around my torso, already regretting
the loss of warmth from the sun.

“
Either the raccoons have
opened a maid service, or somebody wiped this place down,” I
said.

Sawyer stood peering through a doorway into
the next room—the only other room I saw when I crossed to join him.
Here there was an old iron bedstead, canted to one side from age.
There was no mattress atop the interlocking wires of the frame. In
the corner sat a solid wood chair, one of those hand-carved affairs
with a rounded back and arms. The wood was rubbed raw around the
arms, as if someone had been tied there and fought to escape.

I inhaled. The scent of the mountain, of the
green, growing things that were claiming the cabin for their own
came in loud and clear, even though we were inside. Beneath that,
the dust of ages, though here, as in the other room, everything was
strangely clean. Under that faint traces of something kind of
cloying and sweet, almost antiseptic. Chloroform? The reports said
Rich and Molly had been drugged. There was something else too. A
sharp, peppery odor that I didn’t recognize. My head swam a
little.