CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

 

Seth needed this.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked forward to a full moon, if he ever had. But it was finally here and he was revving to go.

Dinner had been a quiet affair. Bauer was always quiet, but the three brothers were even quieter, contemplating what was about to happen and wondering if this particular moonrise was about to change the course of their lives.

Bauer had worked with them every day for the last two weeks and today was the big test. If any of it had worked, if any of his teachings had helped, then they would be able to resist their shifts as the moon rose. At their leisure, they’d be able to calmly, painlessly shift.

Usually Seth thrived on being tested. He was an over-preparer for things like this, whereas Raphael was more of a by-the-seat-of-his-pants sort of test taker. But regardless, they both looked equally nervous sitting at their mother’s dinner table.

Seth wished that Nat were here. She’d be able to fill this terrible silence. But as they hadn’t found a way to describe Bauer’s place in their lives and they didn’t know what the evening would bring, Raph had asked the sisters to stay far away from here.

Seth also wished that Sarah was there. But that wasn’t anything new for him. He found that he was constantly wishing Sarah was around. Ever since the night, over a week ago, that they’d made out in the bathroom and she’d told him about her dad, Seth’s desire for her had become an almost overwhelming ache. He felt it at every moment, ever-present, beating in his gut like a second heart. He wanted her badly.

After she’d told him about her father, he’d helped her clean up and the two of them had watched some television together, of all things. Seth had done his fair share of hooking up, but besides with Natalie and Kaya, he’d never really just hung out with a girl, doing something mundane. He’d thrilled to it. But as soon as she shut the TV off, announced she was tired and headed up to bed, reality had collapsed down on Seth and he’d hightailed it out of there.

He’d realized that the entire night he’d acted like her boyfriend. First, her jealous boyfriend, poking around about her relationship with Jackson. Then her pervy boyfriend, fantasizing about her in the shower. Then they’d made out in the bathroom, something her boyfriend would have the privilege of doing anytime the fancy struck. And then, he’d listened to an emotional problem she was having, helping her sort it out and sticking up for her, which was basically smack dab in the middle of Boyfriendlandia. And perhaps worst of all, he’d cuddled her on a freaking couch with an afghan on their laps and zero sexual shenanigans. Just snuggles for all. What the hell was that?!

Suicide was what it was.

Instead of just jumping off the cliff and being with her, he was killing himself in small increments, all the while telling himself that he wasn’t doing what he’d said he wasn’t going to do.

Bottom line, he wanted her. He still couldn’t have her, because as of the moment he was born, he continued to be a shifter.

Basically, the last week had been a hell of his own making. He’d avoided Sarah at every turn, even going so far as to stay at Jackson’s sad-ass house a few nights. He’d dropped off dinner on her front porch only twice, because he couldn’t resist. But beyond that, he kept himself up to his ears in business and shifter stuff with his brothers. He figured that he wasn’t to be trusted when it came to Sarah. She was too tempting. So he was just going to have to avoid her.

He pushed the mashed potatoes around on his plate and pictured himself as he’d be in about twenty minutes, streamlined and furry and strong and wild and racing through the woods. He thought he might just run as far up the mountain as he could go tonight. He needed to lose some of this toxic energy. He needed to burn through this.

But first, the big test. Whether or not he and his brothers could hold it together during the shift.

“You better finish that plate, son,” Bauer said from across the table, eyeing Seth’s half-eaten meal. “You know a hungry shifter is harder to control.”

“That’s one lesson we learned on our own,” Seth replied, catching Raph’s eye.

“Yeah, and we learned the hard way.” Raph grimaced. “We were kids. Maybe fourteen. And we’d shifted back in the morning to realize we ate garbage the night before. You only make that mistake once.”

Silence reigned again until Seth stood abruptly from his chair. “I’m gonna wait outside.”

It was only eight or so minutes until moonrise and he wanted to spend the time getting ready.

A few minutes later, Raphael and Bauer came out to join him in the secluded backyard.

“Where’s Jacks?”

Raphael gave Seth a pointed look and Seth felt his mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding. After all the training we’ve been doing, he’s still going to chain himself in the basement?”

Raphael sighed as he stripped out of his clothes. “You know him. He says he’ll know if he can control his shift just as well in the basement as he could out here with us.”

“That boy is stubborn as hell,” Bauer growled. “How he survived to adulthood without someone strangling him, I’ll never know.”

“Mom came close a few times,” Raph replied, surveying the sky and waiting for the celestial body which had such a hold over them. “Look. Here she comes.”

His eyes were focused on the horizon and sure enough, there came the orb of the moon, a glowing ghostly white.

Muscle memory kicked in and Seth’s body braced for what he knew was coming. But then Bauer spoke.

“Deep breaths. Don’t fight it. Tame it. Work with your animal, not against him.”

It was a mantra that Bauer had repeated to them a hundred times over the last weeks. Seth had to admit that it had meant almost nothing to him.

Until now.

He felt his shift coming over him, the tidal wave of pain and discomfort that lasted maybe twenty seconds or so. But he did his best to follow Bauer’s words. He breathed deeply and attempted to relax his muscles. He felt it coming and channeled an image of a wave washing over him. Either he could be a lighthouse in a tidal wave or he could be a surfer in a tidal wave, but either way, the wave was coming.

Seth’s eyes, trained on the moon, felt that familiar blurring sensation as the irises began to change, the shape went larger, more almond, his eyelashes went white and fuzzy. Normally, his elbows would crack, then his knees, and he’d fall to the ground as his bones changed shape.

But tonight, for a few tenuous seconds, Seth just swayed where he stood, still in his human form. He found, just for a moment, that when he wasn’t attempting to fight with his shift, it wasn’t attempting to fight back. He felt as if he stood in the doorway of a great room, looking out at the animal his body was trying to make him become. Normally, that animal broke the door down, shook him out and took over. But tonight, for the space of a few breaths, Seth and the animal eyed one another, made a certain truce.

And then, the urge to shift was too great and Seth felt himself step back from that metaphorical doorway. The beast came into the house and Seth’s muscles and bones cracked and stretched viciously. He attempted to relax into the pain, the way that Bauer had encouraged them, but it was too much, it was too great.

Half a minute later, Seth sat on his haunches and howled at the moon. There was no more thought, only instinct and scent and his brother.

The great, furry beast that was Raphael brushed against Seth’s back as he walked past. That was when Seth caught another scent.

His hackles rose and his teeth exposed as Seth rounded on the coyote that was standing in a defensive position not ten feet away.

Seth started to growl, stalking toward the intruder. But Raphael positioned himself in between Seth and the coyote, and then again when Seth swerved around him.

Something tickled in Seth’s canine brain. It was important, different than instinct, different than hunger or fatigue or fear. It was just as real as those things and the sensation was foreign in Seth’s wolf body.

He took one more step toward the grizzled coyote and something like a memory crossed his brain and he realized what that tickling feeling really was. Friend.

This animal in front of him was friend.

Not enemy.

Previously, Seth’s wolf brain had split the world into two. There was brother and not-brother. But now, there was a third category. Brother, not-brother, and friend. Coyote was friend.

Seth sat back on his haunches and cocked his head to one side. Then, a scent on the wind beckoned to him, as it did to the other two animals, and the three of them took off into the woods.

 

 

***

 

 

Bauer was proud of the two young wolves striding along in the woods beside him. He’d seen them do the work tonight. Seth had held out for longer than Raphael had, but Raphael had shifted with what looked like very little pain. And he’d protected Bauer from Seth, which implied that Raphael had some sort of human consciousness going on right now.

And that was very good news. The more wits, the more control these boys had about them, the safer they were going to be.

Safe was what he wanted them. His old coyote joints creaked as he tried to keep up with the two of them, and inside of his brain, Bauer’s human was rolling his eyes at himself.

Bauer had only known these boys for a few weeks and already he was too invested. He’d started out these lessons as a way of saving his own hide. But there he was, late at night, on his cot in the garage, thinking of ways to better help them understand. To do the thing that a parent should have done for them.

It wasn’t their fault they’d been put up for adoption. And it wasn’t Elizabeth’s fault that the only thing she could think to do for a group of shifter sons was to move out west and tuck them into the mountains. In fact, that was probably the best thing she could have done for them.

But these boys were woefully behind on their shifter educations. And that boy Jackson, well, he was behind on a lot of things. It had been wishful thinking on Bauer’s part to hope the boy was going to join his brothers out in the light. He’d spent too many years chained up in the dark to let himself loose now. That one was going to take some time.

Bauer stopped and bowed his head, drinking from a crisp mountain stream when a sound in the distance caught his attention. He strained to hear it again, but was impeded by the two wolves in his company who’d decided to get into a brotherly, snarling tussle, rolling into a pile of leaves and snapping and growling.

The sound came again and this time it chilled Bauer’s blood. In his coyote form, his thoughts weren’t quite the same as in his human form—things were simpler, more instinctual. There were no turns of phrase or wordplay, but he knew enough to be able to identify those sounds.

There were men shouting in the not-so-distant distance.

But he couldn’t hear them over these moronic, fighting boys. Bauer trotted over to them and nipped the wolves, one by one, on their haunches, snarling his teeth at them.

Immediately they stiffened, spoiling for a fight with the old man, but he put his ear to the wind, a signal for them to listen, and to his great surprise, they both did.

He saw it on their beautiful, canine faces that they heard the panicked, angry shouts of men.

He was very grateful that wolves were reluctant animals. They weren’t, by nature, drawn to people. Instinctually, they would want to give these men as wide a berth as he would.

The three of them started trotting northeast, away from town and away from the voices, but as they went, Bauer realized the voices weren’t quieting. In fact they were getting louder.

He was just trying to think of a way to get the boys to switch directions when a gunshot rent the air, slicing the peacefulness of the black September night into shreds.

The three animals jolted and then instinctually froze, attempting to figure out which direction the threat came from.

And that’s when they smelled it. Blood on the air. Oh God. That was animal blood. And there was nothing in season right now. These men were hunting, in the night, on a full moon. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out exactly what they were hunting for.

The voices had quieted but to Bauer’s chagrin, both of the wolves beside him started licking their chops at the scent in the air. Wolves were hunters, but they were also scavengers. If there was a fresh kill somewhere left for dead, they would want to go see about it.

Before he could stop them, the two wolves had taken off running in chase of the blood. He took off after them, pushing himself to move faster, to get there.

They were younger and faster, but not stupid. By the time Bauer caught up to them, they were hidden at the edge of a clearing, still licking their chops, crouched and watching the group of men gathered around something.

“How do we know if it’s a shifter or not?” one man asked another.

“Don’t they shift back if you kill it?”

“No, that’s urban legend.”

“Then how do we know?”

“I told you, we have to haul it back and turn it in to the feds.” This was from a smaller member of the group. Small, but mean. He had a craggy face, brutally short hair and angry eyes. He looked like he was about two seconds away from kicking the carcass in front of him.

“How’d you know that, Race?” one of them asked the small, mean-looking man.

“I know it because I been talking to a fed whose been poking around here since they found that body at the reservoir. They’ll do DNA testing on this mountain lion and figure out if it’s a shifter or not. But make no mistake. It’s a shifter. What else would be out and so bold on a full moon?”

The men shuffled around a bit and that’s when Bauer got a glimpse of what they were all huddled around. He’d known it was a dead animal, but sure enough, there was a mountain lion, golden, lying on its side and curled forward. A pool of blood wet the forest floor beneath it.

Bauer’s heart raced with the danger of the situation. Not only for him, but for the boys beside him as well. He looked over at them and saw that there was no longer a wild hunger in their eyes. They no longer panted after the blood on the air. Instead, they watched the men with caution in their eyes, wariness.

Bauer, careful not to startle them, nudged at their shoulders. They needed to get out of here. Seth took a few steps away, following Bauer, but Raphael stayed behind, still staring at the men with guns standing over the body of a beautiful animal.

Bauer went back and nudged Raphael again and this time the wolf instinctually butted back at him, a low growl in his chest. The men in the clearing froze as fast as Bauer did.

“Did you hear that?”

“A growl?”

The thin, bright beam of a flashlight swept the woods to their left and then directly over the three animals, catching the reflective orbs of their eyes.

Shit, Bauer barely had time to think.

“There’s animals out there!”

“Wolves, I think!”

A shot split the air and part of the tree above Seth’s head exploded like a firework. The boys jolted and Bauer nipped at them to get them moving, and fast.

They took off at a sprint through the woods, the men shouting and tearing after them, crashing through the brush. Every few moments another shot would explode around them.

There were two things that Bauer was grateful for. One, the boys were smart enough not to run back in the direction of their home. And two, they were fast. They were already twenty feet in front of him, now twenty-five.

Bauer was much faster than the men on foot, but he was feeling his age in his joints. He waited until the boys were just a little bit further through the woods and then he deviated from the path they were running on, made a little bit of extra noise. He heard the men crashing after him instead of the boys and he was glad. He let loose a war-like growl.

Bark exploded to his right as one of the men took aim at him. And then there was a blinding pain in his left haunch and he knew he’d been hit.

Hit but not dead, he thought and kept moving. The pain increased as his speed decreased. They were going to catch him soon.

Luckily there was a stream ahead that Bauer knew. He crossed it quickly, the water bitingly cold on his paws. On the opposite bank was an outcropping that was almost cavelike. He was just small enough to fit there without being seen.

He had just finished pressing himself back, hiding himself from sight, when the boots of the men’s feet came into view, splashing into the creek. He wanted to keep watching, but he knew that the reflections in his eyes would give him away if they swept their flashlights his way. So, he closed his eyes, and tucked his snout under one foot, hoping his fur would camouflage him into the gray brown rock around him.

After a few moments, he heard the frustrated noises of the men.

“We lost it.”

“Yeah, but I got it in the back leg. It’s out here somewhere.”

“Then it’ll die out here somewhere, too. We’ve got our work cut out for us dragging that lion back down the mountain.”

And then their noises receded, their scents along with it. The pain in Bauer’s back leg was pounding, but not sharp. In a way, it was almost soothing. Pain had been his constant companion for so many years that he almost welcomed it.

He was warm there and protected under the outcropping. His eyes drifted closed and his consciousness drifted away.

 

***

 

 

Bauer opened his human eyes when he felt a dog’s cold nose against his forehead. He blinked up into the face of a very familiar wolf. Raphael was nosing him.

The boy was still shifted, which meant that the moon was still out. Bauer, however, had shifted back to his human form in his sleep, as he occasionally did. But only when he was injur—

“Yowch.” He winced as he tried to sit up, remembering the wound he’d sustained last night. The men. The hunters. The dead mountain lion.

He twisted and looked at the back of his leg. There wasn’t as much blood as he’d thought there’d be and with a few small inspections, he deemed that the bullet had grazed him, leaving behind a half-inch-deep trough in its wake. He tried to sit up again and groaned. Raphael’s wet nose pushed into his head again, harder this time.

In a different situation, Bauer might have been extremely wary of the untrained shifter wolf who was biting distance from his face. But now, he found he was simply too exhausted.

His eyes drifted closed again and didn’t come open until there was light flashing across his eyelids, turning them red. There were footsteps too, and a familiar voice cursing into the pre-dawn air.

He opened his eyes and saw the very edge of the sky lightening. He also saw two wolves and a woman crouching in between them, peering at him.

Elizabeth. She was here.

Which meant that Seth had gone to get her while Raphael had stayed with Bauer.

Even though his situation was far from good, he couldn’t help but feel proud of the boys. This was progress. This was a very far cry from completely feral animals. The training must have worked in some measure or another.

“How you feeling, old man?” Elizabeth asked, shining the flashlight at the ground to get it out of his eyes.

“Grand,” he groaned. He tried to sit up and failed, wincing as he curled onto his side. “Actually, I feel like an old, naked man who’s just been shot and is now lying in the freezing cold mud.”

She had the grace to smile at him. She inspected his wound with the flashlight. “It’s not infected yet.” She quickly taped a wad of gauze to the wound and then pulled a blanket out of a bag on her back. “Let’s get you warm while we wait an hour for these boys to shift back.”

She tucked the blanket around him and handed down a bottle of water. She sat close enough for him to absorb some of her heat and he figured that was intentional. She was a very smart woman, after all.

Looking up at her, with the blue morning on its way, Bauer was suddenly struck by the fact that she was attractive. He hadn’t thought much on it before. Perhaps it was just the bullet wound talking. But he had to admit that she had a nice look about her. Youthful, even in her age. Sharp, put-together.

He let his eyes drift closed again.

This time, when he woke up, it was because he was being slid onto a blanket as Seth and Raphael, in their human forms, each took an end. They lifted him into the air and immediately started down the mountain. He tried not to make things worse by wincing with each jostle.

“Wait,” he whispered after a few minutes. “Wait. I hear something.”

And sure enough, when the boys paused, they heard it, too. Footsteps and conversation just over a ridge to their left.

“We shot it a hundred yards back that way. Look there. You can see the blood. We should be able to track the animal. Or the shifter. Whatever it is.”

Bauer’s blood froze as he made eye contact with Elizabeth. “The hunters. I recognize their voices,” he whispered. “They came back. They’re going to be led straight to the outcropping.”

“And to all the tracks we just left behind,” she whispered back, her face leaching of color. Even an inexperienced tracker would be able to spot the mingling of coyote, wolf and human tracks. As if a preternatural calm were falling over her, she straightened her back and turned to her sons. “Get him down the mountain. I’ll double back and muddle the tracks.”

“Mom, no!” Seth said, his knuckles white where he held on to Bauer. “We’re not letting you stay up the mountain alone with a bunch of shifter hunters.”

“They’ll have no quarrel with me. And if they even see me, I’ll say I was out birdwatching. She dug in her bag and dragged out a pair of binoculars. She put them around her neck. “If they find you and Bauer, they’re going to figure it out, Seth. They’ll see his wound and put two and two together. They’ll know what Bauer is and they’ll probably know what you are. So get him down the mountain now.”

She didn’t stay to argue. She charged, as quietly as possible, back up the mountain.

“She’s right,” Bauer whispered. “If they see me shot in the ass and you boys half-dressed and looking like you’ve been rolling in dirt all night, they’re going to know what you are. They might even kill us. But the sooner you get me down the mountain, the sooner one of you can come back up and be with her. You hear?”

Raphael and Seth nodded and then moved double time down the mountain.

 

 

***

 

 

“What the fuck is this?” Jackson shouted as he met them in the kitchen, a bloodied and battered Bauer now lying on the floor. “What happened?”

“Bauer will explain,” Seth said as he grabbed a shirt from the laundry room and turned to sprint back up the mountain. He didn’t care that he was exhausted. Or that he was starving and thirsty and freaked as hell from his experiences last night. His mother was alone on the mountain with group of men who had no problem killing.

Fuck. That.

He was halfway across the backyard, Jackson shouting after him, when his mother broke through the trees that lined her backyard, panting and sweating, color high on her cheeks.

“It’s fine,” she told him. “I obscured the tracks and got away. They didn’t follow me.”

Seth strode to her and hugged her up, his thoughts whirring a mile a minute.

The next two hours passed in a strange, blurred high speed. Jackson stitching up Bauer’s wound, Raphael explaining to the family all the differences he’d felt in his shift. Seth trying like hell to keep a lid on things and failing.

He needed space. He needed normalcy.

His family seemed to know this and let him leave without too much protest. Seth stood in his shower at home until the water ran cold. He’d so wanted that shift to be different. To have some control over it.

And he’d had a few seconds at the beginning when he could almost taste what it would be like to have control. But then he’d lost it all. He’d been as wild as ever. He’d actually salivated over the blood of a murdered animal.

He remembered the mountain lion, lying in its own blood, and he felt sick. His stomach curdled.

He remembered the way he’d almost attacked Bauer at the beginning of the night. He remembered the way he’d fled from the hunters with no thought to Bauer. Leaving the old man behind to get shot.

If he’d been in his human mind, none of those things would have happened. But he hadn’t been. He’d been in his wolf mind. An animal. A beast.

He was so fucking sick of being dangerous.

Seth was exhausted from the night but he had work to do today, it was a weekday. So he got dressed and commenced with the longest workday of his life. Raphael showed up a half an hour later than Seth did and they didn’t speak to one another as they ripped up a section of a client’s yard.

They worked hard through lunch and finally quit around four. Seth felt as if he’d die if he didn’t hit a mattress in the next half hour.

If he wasn’t such a neat freak, he would have collapsed into his bed, but the idea of dirt on his sheets was so grotesque to him that he forced himself to bathe. He had just pulled on a pair of underwear when his doorbell rang.

He yanked on pants and stalked downstairs, his fatigue making him forget his manners as he yanked open the door.

“Hi—ohmygod—boyyoyyoyyoing,” Sarah said as her eyes bottomed out on his chest.

He barely had the energy for a smile.

“God, you’re beautiful,” she continued, her eyes traveling upwards. And then she got to his face. “Actually, strike that. You look like total crap. Seth, are you all right?”

“I’m just tired,” he told her.

“Okay,” she said, obviously not believing him. “I know you’re avoiding me, but I don’t care. I brought you some cookies that I bought, but am pretending I made. And some of that lemon-lavender juice you love so much but I think tastes like dish soap. And what else? Oh. I brought you a DVD of my favorite movie to watch and I figured you’d make me dinner. Because come on, I’m pretty bright, you’re a dinner-making kind of guy.” She held up the box of stuff she had. “It’s a date in a box. Don’t make me go back to my lonely house and do this date all alone.”

He blinked down at her. She was tan and honey-colored and in athletic clothes as usual, her hair in a wet bun on her head. She looked warm and soft and the memory of her taste danced on his tongue. He wanted to face plant into her and never resurface. This wasn’t fair. Last night should have been all the evidence he’d ever need to prove that he was way too much trouble for her. But it had also exhausted him so much that all of his defenses were down. He couldn’t fight it. He couldn’t fight her.

He stepped back to let her inside and sort of swayed on his feet.

“Jeez. Or maybe I should come back later after you’ve slept?”

“No,” he heard himself say. “A movie sounds great.”

He led her back to his living room, telling himself that he’d order food for them in a minute, and collapsed onto the couch, motioning listlessly to the television. He yanked an afghan over him and leaned back.

Moments later, he felt Sarah’s heat beside him and then her hand on his forehead. She was saying something to him, but everything just sort of melted together and floated away.