Red (29 page)

Until I fell again and just couldn’t make
myself get up. Couldn’t make myself care about the smell of my own
blood or the physical aches of shifting and exertion. Breath sawed
in and out of my throat, my chest rising and falling in great
gusts. And in my mind I saw Sawyer’s chest. Blood-soaked and
still.

My clawed fingers curled deep into the dirt
and leaves, hanging on for dear life, as if the earth was going to
give up its gravity and I’d go spiraling into space without some
kind of anchor. Lost. Because Sawyer had been my anchor. And now he
was dead. Because of me.

Oh God.

If I’d gone back when he asked . . . If we’d
consulted his dad . . . Jesus, how had they worked with Patrick all
this time and Patrick not
known
what they were? Why was he
only after me?

Sawyer was dead.

It should’ve been me. Never him. It should
have been
me.

My claws dug in deeper and I hung on as the
world started to shake. Great rolling heaves that left me nauseous
and dizzy and wondering what fault line was acting up. Then I
realized it wasn’t the ground shaking, it was me. I curled my knees
to my chest and held on, helpless against the onslaught of
grief.

I was alone. Before him I’d thought I was
prepared. I’d thought I was made for this. But it was a lie.
Solitude had never been a choice for me. I’d accepted him as part
of my life, part of my future, with joy. To know that he wouldn’t
be there to see me on the other side of transition, to teach me
what it meant to be wolf, was a stunning sort of pain.

My limbs convulsed and popped, stretching,
shortening, my wolf unable to decide whether to retreat or burst
free. She could escape the truth of Sawyer’s loss no more than I
could. Sharp, hitching breaths gave way to a keening wail that fell
somewhere between a sob and a howl. It echoed, long and loud, and I
knew it was as good as giving away my location, but I couldn’t hold
it in. With each breath, the sound continued to roll out of me. An
audible manifestation of denial. Of mourning.

When the first howl joined me, I barely
registered the tone, harmonic with my own wail. But the second and
third got my attention. I choked off my cry, listening as a chorus
of four or five other wolves joined in my mourning song. I
recognized the voices. The red wolves. The ones I’d been hearing
off and on for the last few years. But close. So much closer than
I’d ever heard them before. Or maybe that was my own newly acute
hearing.

I howled again, waiting for the replies. The
next ones were closer. Again. Even closer. They were coming toward
me. Answering my call for . . . For what? Comfort? For pack? For
all I knew they were coming to evict me from their territory. But I
didn’t think so. As I listened to the chorus of howls, I wasn’t
afraid. They didn’t sound aggressive. They weren’t hunting. They
were very specifically responding to me.

When the first wolf appeared over the rise,
my heart leapt. Not in fear, but in a moment of joy, of conviction
that I’d been right. But the emotion was fleeting, swallowed by the
knowledge that if I’d never pursued this, if Sawyer had never met
me, he’d be alive now.

Another cry tore free of my throat.

The wolf on the rise lifted its head and
howled in answer, a long ululating cry of mourning. I’d always kind
of thought that wolf howls sounded sad, but this was somehow
different. This was . . . acknowledging a loss. My loss.

He was beautiful. I could only just make out
his markings in the dark, but his golden eyes were clear as he came
nearer. Different from Sawyer, of course. Smaller, but still broad
in the shoulder. Others came from the surrounding woods,
approaching me with caution but not aggression. Five in all. Two
males. Three females.

The next wail I made was softer, exhaustion
catching up with me. Their replies blended with my voice. A
beautiful, haunting lament. It didn’t make things better, didn’t
make things easier, but somehow still, it helped.

I expected the wolves to keep their
distance. I was not pack. I was not even really their kind. As the
howls morphed into far more human tears, they didn’t scatter but
came closer. I gasped at the bump of the first head against my
back, hardly daring to move. One by one they came to me,
head-butting, rubbing, and nuzzling me, offering comfort through
touch. I was pathetically grateful for the contact and just cried
harder.

At length they lay down around me, backs
pressed against me in a cocoon of fur that should have been
stifling in the heat of the night. But in the midst of my grief, I
was still feverish and chilled, and their warmth helped ease some
of the ache.

I relaxed into the pile of warm bodies,
exhaustion taking its toll, though the last thing I wanted was to
sleep and dream. I didn’t know why they were accepting me. But I
was too tired and too overcome by the events of the night to
question it. I’d run for miles. I had no supplies, no maps, no
compass. Nothing to rely on but myself. Except, it seemed, this
small pack of wolves that shouldn’t even exist.

~*~

Sawyer

A six ton elephant was sitting on my chest.
It wasn’t particularly interested in moving so I could breathe and
it certainly wasn’t helping the burning pain radiating out from the
hole in my chest. At least it was probably staunching the blood.
What was left of it. I was pretty sure I’d been bleeding out when
I’d lost consciousness.

It was hard to think past the pain.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was cognizant enough to
recognize that pain was actually a good thing. Something about not
being dead. I wasn’t sure how long that would be the case. But my
body was trying to repair the damage. Healing was painful business,
and I was stuck between forms. Mostly human, but my insides felt
scrambled. I was pretty sure that was the only reason I was still
alive. My heart had relocated, shifting over in preparation for
becoming a wolf. So instead of a one way trip to hell, I got a
collapsed lung. Peachy.

I took the fact that I could hear the
whistle of my breath in and out as a positive sign. Not that the
accompanying gurgle was good thing. I wondered if there was anyone
else to hear the whistle-gurgle of my breathing. I listened for the
span of ten shallow breaths. But I was alone.

No one left to finish me off, then.

I paused at that thought, my brain circling
around the idea that someone had tried to kill me. I’m sure I
should’ve been alarmed at the notion, but instead I was gripped by
a deep sense of unease that I couldn’t remember what had happened.
Patience was never one of my strong suits, but there was something
at the edge of my consciousness that left me simmering with a need
to act, to move to do . . . something. Instead I waited for the
whistle-gurgle to stop, for my lungs to heal enough for me to draw
a full breath and not feel like I was drowning.

I opened my eyes. At least, I thought I did.
The pitch black didn’t change any, so I really wasn’t sure if I’d
managed it. Eventually my eyes adjusted enough to see the hint of
light coming from a window across the room. It seemed to be mostly
obstructed. A bush or tree or something. But I could tell enough to
know that it was night.

How long had I been here?

That question lodged in my brain and began
to swell with importance. I needed to know how long I’d been here.
There was something I was supposed to do.

My body wasn’t quite with the program when I
tried to sit up. It took several tries, and then I only managed to
roll over on my side before I had to rest. I cast my eyes around
the room, trying to see if there were any clues in this new
direction. Then I saw the tranquilizer dart. It lay beside some
rubble on the floor, gleaming very faintly in the dim
moonlight.

The dart hadn’t worked.

In my mind I saw it lodged in the neck of my
opponent as we grappled on the floor, struggling for control of the
gun. He hadn’t been the one to weaken. I had. Because he’d been
wearing wolfsbane. I hadn’t been able to kill him.

Then I saw his face as he stood, gun in
hand, watching me bleed out on the floor, regret etched in every
feature.

Patrick.

Betrayal was a fresh wound as I struggled to
remember why we’d been fighting. Why I’d been shot.

Elodie
.

I jack-knifed up, then collapsed again with
a wheeze and grunt of agony.

Patrick was trying to kill Elodie.

“
Elodie.” What I’d intended
as a shout came out at barely a whisper. Half a lung’s breath
wasn’t enough to make myself heard. I tried again.
“Elodie.”

There was no response, and panic had me
pushing through the weakness and onto my knees so I could survey
the room. It was empty but for the puddle of drying blood where I’d
been lying. There was no other body, which was at once a relief and
a terror. Where was she?

Inch by painful inch, I dragged myself to
the threshold of the other room, nose tuned to try and pick up her
scent. It wasn’t fresh, and there was no other source of blood,
save mine. I collapsed in the doorway when I saw she wasn’t
here.

So she’d made it out of the cabin then.

But she’d been changing, caught halfway
between forms again when I’d last seen her. How far could she have
gotten if she didn’t run until after I’d been shot?

I needed to get outside to check the
perimeter of the cabin, but my body refused to obey. so instead I
slumped against the doorjamb and listened outside for any sign that
she was near. That she was alive. But there was nothing beyond the
raucous noise of the crickets and cicadas. We were not yet into
deep night, then, when all fell quiet. Unless, it was the next
day.

How long had I been out? Regenerating from a
gunshot wound was no small feat. In all reality, it could take
days. She could have been out there, running from Patrick
for
days
. In pain from transition
for days
. And I wasn’t
there to stop him or ease her or protect her.

Mother fucker.

I thought about shifting, but it wasn’t
magic. It wasn’t like in movies or books where shifting
miraculously cured all ills. If I tried to go wolf now, I could rip
stuff that had already started repairing and speed up my own
demise. And shit, being stuck as I was, I hoped like hell things
were repairing the way they were supposed to. So as much as every
atom of my being wanted to go after them, to find Elodie, and to
kill the son of a bitch who’d left me for dead, I needed to sit
tight. I wouldn’t make it ten feet in the shape I was in now.

Which left me with a whole lot of time and a
very vivid imagination that was all too happy to supply the various
and sundry ways Patrick could maim, torture, and kill Elodie.

I was half mad with rage and desperation
within fifteen minutes.

And why the fuck wasn’t I healing? I wasn’t
dead, but I wasn’t hearing any kind of change in the
whistle-gurgle. The wound should be fucking closing by now. I was
struck by a moment of blind panic. What if it wasn’t
going
to heal? What if just not dying had sapped my body’s healing
resources? What if I was stuck here, lingering and completely
useless until . . . until what? My body gave out and died? Until I
starved? Until Patrick came back to clean up my body?

My wolf reared up at that, demanding action
I couldn’t perform. But my nose sharpened and I smelled the
bittersweet, evergreen scent of wolfsbane. I shoved back the panic
and tried to focus, my nose twitching, searching for the source
because it was something
active
, something that kept me
outside my head and all the crazy-making going on there.

Collapsed in the doorway, I scanned the
floor, which I could see better with my wolf so close to the
surface. The moon had risen, giving me a bit more light to work
with, and now that I looked, I could see what I’d taken to be grit
before scattered over the floor. Not grit, I realized. Dried petals
of the plant. Everywhere. It must’ve fallen out of Patrick’s
pockets or something as we fought.

Shit
.

I had to get out of here.

Moving hurt like a sonofabitch, but that was
good. Pain kept me focused on the task at hand. I was too weak to
crawl again, so I had to drag myself, shimmying in some parody of a
commando crawl across the floor. I damn near passed out again at
the halfway point.

Oh no you fucking don’t. Get up.

The mental whip didn’t get me on my knees,
but it got me inching forward again. At one point I had to stop for
a coughing fit, spitting up the blood flooding my lung. Maybe it
was making more room for oxygen. The notion of a full breath was
like the idea of winning the lottery. It felt like an appealing, if
distant, possibility. Once the coughing stopped, I was moving
again, dragging myself through the fresh blood and toward the
door.

Of course it was closed. That in itself
presented a whole new challenge. Because getting myself vertical
enough to reach and work the knob was like my own personal
Everest.

Elodie was waiting.

More importantly, Elodie probably thought I
was dead, and given her predilections toward suicide, I needed to
get the hell out of here and find her before she decided to go
after Patrick and take him out with her.

It took a full five minutes to work my knees
under my chest, and another ten using the door as leverage to get
myself sort of vertical. But when my hands closed over the iron
handle, I felt like crowing. Except, of course, that required more
air than I could mange.

I twisted and pulled, falling backward as
the door swung inward. The night air rushed in, hot and humid and
clean. I flipped myself over and made like the tortoise for the
open doorway.