BloodMoon (13 page)

That was the last thing I remembered until I awoke the next morning on the floor of our campsite, spooning with Will on my front side…and Jackson snuggled up to my back.

“Um, guys.” I cleared my throat and elbowed Jackson in the gut.

He groaned. “A little bit lower and you would have gotten my nuts.”

Will began to wake, so I stood and performed a quick leap over the men. Some women would have thought they’d died and gone to heaven. I just felt nauseated and proceeded to drive the point home as I retched, naked, over a fallen log.

“What’s wrong with Ashlee?” Will asked.

“Must have been something she ate,” Jackson deadpanned and loped over to join his human mate. Sully was already standing by a small camp stove set up on an old picnic table and was happily percolating coffee, old-school, in a battered steel pot. A stack of paper cups, cream and sugar waited beside it.

Jackson kissed Sully a good morning and asked, “Everyone accounted for?”

“As far as I can tell. Do you remember anything that happened last night?”

“Not a thing,” Jackson said. “But my wolf is still asleep and satisfied. So, it can’t have been that bad. No disasters, right?” He sniffed the air. “Do you smell…?”

“Colby, yeah,” Sully answered. “I think we’d better check on the kid. You’ve got her cell phone, right?”

Jackson nodded and began to dress.

Colby, here? That couldn’t be right. I mean, I’d left her locked in my cage. They must be mistaken. Maybe they smelled her on my clothes or something.

I’d finished tossing my cookies and turned to find Will handing me a cup of coffee for mouthwash, when I heard Siegfried barking in my head.

Ashlee! You’ve got to get home now! Amber’s in a coma and I can’t reach her
! His voice came through loud and clear. In fact, it seemed the whole pack heard it. Must be a canine thing.

“Sounds like you’d best get home,” Jackson said and pointed to the vehicles waiting for us at the trailhead.

Will and I shimmied into our clothes and raced for the parking lot, throwing ourselves into a car and telling the driver to step on it. Out the window I saw Adam standing in all his killer gear, finger to his ear, watching in puzzlement as we drove by.

I blew open the twin bond, but got nothing. Will called Samantha, while I phoned Adam to give him a quick, reassuring report and ask about last night.

“Yes, we did have an audible alarm go off and one of my men reported a wolf heading toward the interior of our perimeter, but I thought it must have been one of you guys getting too frisky, not a wolf coming in from outside.”

“Some security you are.”

“Hey, you try guarding a whole square mile of wooded mountains in the dark with twenty men. There’s only so much I can do.”

“Yeah, sorry. Thanks.” I hung up. Then I called Con. Yes, I had the vampire on speed dial. I didn’t like it, but this was my reality. As Bob Dylan once said, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody, and Con had his place in things, even if he wasn’t as much in charge as he liked to think.

Sister Lena, Siegfried and Colby met us at the door. I ran through the kitchen to my sister’s bedroom. Nurse Sam was already hooking Amber up with an IV. Elle was looking lost holding her partner’s hand.

Peg sat in a chair next to Elle, praying, and Con stood in a corner of the room. Even with the shades drawn he looked incredibly pale in the indirect day glow. I wondered how much sunlight he could tolerate before he burst into flames, or whatever vampires really did outside of movies.

Meanwhile, Ghost Mom floated like a worried angel above the lot of us.

“What happened?” I demanded.

“You happened,” Elle said, and then she bit her lip.

Ouch. I began to cry. Maybe I deserved that. No matter how much good I did in the world, deep down, I always felt like a colossal screw-up.

Siegfried bumped me in the crotch and I dropped to the carpeted floor to hold him.

“Siegfried, come,” Elle said, cruelly, I thought.

I’m sorry, Ashlee
, he thought at me and he went to comfort his mistress, but Spanky was more than happy to take his place. At least one member of the family still loved me.

Peg was the one who acted the adult and jumped into the fray. “Don’t let Elle blame you, Ash. Apparently Amber got up suddenly in the middle of the night and recited the ride-along spell. Elle thought she was dreaming, but she found Amber on the floor in a coma when she woke up this morning.”

“So, where is she, Siegfried?” I asked. “Her spirit, I mean.”

I can’t tell. She didn’t jump into me
, the poodle said.

I told them, “Siegfried doesn’t know and I’ve pinged the twin bond, but all I get is this echo in my head.”

“She’s traumatized,” Ghost Mom said. Of course nobody else except for Siegfried and Spanky heard her.

“What do you mean, she’s traumatized? I’m talking to Ghost Mom,” I told the room.

“Amber had a premonition, woke up scared and apparently cobbled together a spell on the fly. I think she thought she was going to jump into your body, but the closest shifter in proximity was...”

“Colby,” I said, jumping to the nearest conclusion. I quickly relayed the message and turned to find the teenager standing at the bedroom door, Sister Lena behind her.

“I think she’s in my head,” the kid said. “She’s not saying much. But, when I close my eyes, I see her curled up in the dark in the fetal position. When my wolf tries to get close to comfort her, she just stares wide-eyed and whimpers.”

“So what do we do?”

“Amber’s like that monkey who shoved his hand into a coconut to get a trinket, but because he’s got his hand bunched in a fist, he can’t get it back out,” Mom said and I repeated.

“So, what, I’m the coconut?” Colby asked.

I couldn’t help but laugh. I’m sorry. I’m inappropriate that way. When things get awkward and dark, I get snarky. It’s an involuntary defense. “In other words, whatever it is that’s keeping her there…”

Mom finished for me. “She’s gotta let it go.”

“I guess we need to wait until she’s ready to talk.” I relayed that to the room while Elle got up and faced Colby down.

The girl tried to back away, but Sister Lena stood beside her whispering in her ear. “This isn’t about you, Colby,” she said to the frightened teenager. “Elle just needs you to be strong while she delivers a message to her wife.”

“But…”

“You can do this. Remember, this isn’t about you,” Sister Lena said.

Before I knew what the hell was happening, Elle had taken Colby into her arms and laid a smackaroo on the young lycanthrope the likes of which I know I’ve never seen from the two of them – my sister-in-law and Amber, I mean. For a moment there, I felt a movement in the ethereal force. It was as if the twin bond thrummed within me. I placed a hand on my nervous stomach.

Then she, Elle, looked deep into the heart of the teenage werewolf, to where my sister’s spirit might be lurking, and said, “Take all the time you need, love. That’s just one of the things waiting for you when you return.”

Instead of standing there with my mouth open looking shocked, I turned to Con and said, “You’ll donate some of your magicky blood if we need you to, right?”

To which Peg answered, “Of course he will.”

But Elle was having none of it. “All of you need to clear out. Colby, would you mind staying in the guest room so you can be close? Amber was going to offer it to you anyway while you were in town.”

“Sure, no worries,” Colby said, so we all left Elle to sit with Amber’s body.

We seemed to be at somewhat of a collective loss, and stood around making uneasy small talk. Will suggested we fix breakfast, so we threw out a spread my sister would have been proud of. It only dawned on me a little later that, when Colby began to pitch in, it was like she had a sense of where everything was, despite never having been there. Not once did I tell her where to find anything. And if that didn’t convince me that my twin sister was still alive in the young were, I don’t know what would.

It took Amber a couple of days to come out of her spiritual catatonia, during which time there were
way
too many people traipsing in and out of the Gordon-Scott house than was normal and to my sister’s liking, what with witches and werewolves and all. I think it might have been that more than anything as I saw Colby’s eyes narrow at the coffee rings on the kitchen counters, spurring Amber toward recovery. Never underestimate the primal rage of an OCD housekeeper.

We weres still couldn’t remember most of the details about what happened over the Blood Moon, but I was getting disturbing flashes from my wolf, coming clearer all the time.

I called Adam and tried to get more information, but he told me his people had merely manned the perimeter and made sure the wolves stayed within bounds. He repeated the report about when the perimeter alarms had been triggered, but to him it had seemed one of the younger wolves had wandered too close to the demarcation zone.

That reminded me about Jackson and Sully claiming to smell Colby. Hmm. I’d have to dig further into this.

Later, according to Adam, what he saw from the high-powered binoculars he was using, we all took down a longhorn steer and there seemed to be a lot of wolf-sex going on, and then we all laid down and fell asleep. He’d let his team go once he started to see signs of morning and confirmed all the sleepers looked human again. After everyone had awoken, he’d left as well.

Colby pulled me aside one morning as we were sitting at the main house kitchen peninsula chowing down on donuts from Crave. “Amber wants to talk to you.”

“Oh, thank God!” I answered. I’d felt the twin bond twitching, but the emotion and turmoil I was getting, without any clarity of information to back it up, was seriously chapping my hide.

“Alone,” she said, lowering her voice, so I grabbed a few Bavarian crèmes and a couple of coffees and we exited the main house, rounded the pool and entered my domain.

“I don’t drink coffee,” Colby said.

“But Amber does,” I told her.

She smiled my sister’s smile, which was hella weird coming from someone else, and took a sip before setting it on the coffee table, along with the pastries.

We sat cross-legged on the futon, facing each other. “So, how does this work?” I asked.

“Amber can take control of my body if I let her. All I have to do is step aside in my own head and her consciousness comes forward. But you should know, I do hear and see everything, so whatever Amber tells you, I’ll end up knowing.”

“Yeah, I got that part. Well, Colby, little sister, guess it’s time for some TMI.” I was making light of the situation, but deep down I was seriously worried.

Colby closed her eyes and relaxed, breathing deeply. When she opened them and looked at me, I realized that it was Amber behind those orbs.

“Oh Amb,” I said and moved forward to cradle her in my arms. She let me for a moment, then sniffled and pushed me back.

“Don’t make me cry, Ashlee,” she said, then bogarted one of my donuts and began to eat. “Oh my God, this is
soo
good,” she said.

My jaw dropped. My sister was fastidious about what she ate, avoiding anything unhealthy.

“Don’t look at me like that. The kid’s young and she’s a werewolf. Hell, in this body, I can eat whatever I want and she’ll just burn it off. Beats being in Siegfried; I stay too long inside him and I’ll be begging Elle for table scraps.”

“So, what happened?”

She finished the sugary confection, very messily, and then used the hand sanitizer she always carried with her no matter what body she seemed to be inhabiting.

Then, with Colby’s mouth, Amber shared.

“After the Street Witches did the Blood Moon protection spell we were all pretty wiped, so I went to bed early. I heard a strange noise out back, and I woke up absolutely terrified for you, Ash. I shouldn’t have, I guess, but I said the ride-along spell to try to jump to you and warn you, and the next thing I knew, I was in Colby and I was a wolf and tearing up the mountain following the sound of a whole lot of howling. I tried to stop my headlong rush to wherever I was, and then I thought to open up the twin bond, but you just weren’t there. You must have already turned.

“Then it was like the pull of the moon and the need to run took Colby-wolf over, and dragged me along with it. It felt like that time I was riding horseback and I lost control of the horse. All I could do was hang on for dear life.

“Colby’s wolf was so happy to be reunited with the pack, and at first, it was amazing. All of these alphas on display, primping and preening, sparring and dancing, playing tug-of-war with a beef carcass and eventually playing with each other. But something about Colby being there set everyone on edge.”

“She’s an unattached alpha female in her prime. I bet there was confusion.” I said. “Without their human minds, they didn’t know where to put her in the pecking order.”

“Yes, well. I tried to steer her away from the males who looked like they were ready to mount her and the females who wanted to drive her off, but before I could, I saw something. Something awful.”

“What was it?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“You were the other anomaly. Your wolf, I mean. I don’t know how to tell you this, Ashlee, but your wolf isn’t monogamous.”

“I most certainly am,” I said. “Wolves mate for life.”

“Just let me tell it. While the rest of the pack was eating and the mated pairs were, um, doing it, you and Will were getting it on too.”

“Getting it on. Nice image, Amb,” I said, and turned my attention inward to my wolf, who’d been sitting up on her haunches, listening. She arched her head at me coyly, lay down belly up and showed me the little bulge we had going.

“So much for waiting. Guess Will got his wish after all,” I said.

“I stayed upwind and watched your pack go from deadly predators to doggie style within a half hour. It was like having a front row seat to a National Geographic documentary.”

I snorted. “Like that song – something about doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel?”